YouTube has stepped up its assault on traditional TV by launching 60 new channels featuring broadcast-quality content made by top producers.

The Google-owned video website has linked up with media companies including Hat Trick, All3Media and ITN for the UK channels, which include the Jamie Oliver Food Channel, BBC Worldwide's On Earth and Mixmag TV.

YouTube's initiative is part of the Original Channels project launched last October in the US, which will roll out in France and Germany as well as the UK.

ITN Productions has created a channel called Truthloader, featuring reports from citizen journalists, and Grazia magazine and Gravity Road has produced Fashtag, with fashion features live from London's Carnaby Street.

"The insight for us was that though some partners were making successful businesses out of creating content on YouTube, it was not happening at the scale or the pace that we would love to see it happening, or as widely in terms of genre," said Ben McOwen Wilson, director of YouTube for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"[Original Channels] is accelerating that, jumpstarting it, to get more partners working with us to create original content for the platform."

It is understood that YouTube YouTube is offering an advance to channels taking part, and will offer them a share of revenue once this is recouped. McOwen Wilson said YouTube had seen a huge number of pitches for the new channels, but wanted content that exploited YouTube's interactivity and could respond to comments and shares among viewers, rather than lengthy pre-written series.

"It is not a dumping ground. Some of these ideas couldn't be done on traditional television, which couldn't afford the specificity of the audience or the interactivity," he added.

In the US, Google invested a reported $100m to kickstart the first 100 channels in October 2011, which included content from CNN, MTV and ESPN.

McOwen Wilson would not confirm the value of Google's investment in the project but said as a for-profit organisation it has to be a viable financial model, and that YouTube would be looking at the investment over a two-year period.

"This model is essentially a revenue advance – we are not paying for production," he said. "A number of partners who have brought us ideas have chosen to launch channels on their own, without our funding, and some partners don't want a cash advance because they want to be able to share in revenues earlier on. That's exactly the process we hoped would happen."

YouTube claimed last month that 20 of those channels now generate more than 1m views each week; the most popular by some way is currently music channel The Warner Sound, which generated more than 9m views last week.

McOwen Wilson said YouTube is looking to expand Original Channels to other markets, including the rest of Europe and Asia. "The more forward thinking traditional broadcast partners are absolutely seeing us as a very complementary partner in that ecosystem, but not everyone has embraced and worked with us yet."

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