His thoughts mainly centred on the following issues (most of which are not specific only to television but also the state of most technology, web and computing related industry in the UK):

• The status of engineering subjects in UK education culture (i.e. they're quite unpopular, ensuring that the talent pool for many major industries remains woefully understocked)
• Further to the previous point; the increasing distance between humanities and sciences that exists due to students having to often prioritise one or the other at an early stage in their academic careers, thus impacting negatively on the potential for innovation according to Schmidt
• The state of the corporate ecosystem in the UK, which excels at supporting small to medium enterprises but has a very poor track record at nurturing the really big organisations (such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook or Apple for example)
• The need for a detailed reconsideration of how the public and private  sectors interact and co-exist, so that good ideas can move freely and, again, the scope for innovation can be expanded

That's just a small sample of the impressive scope of the lecture (it lasts a good 65 minutes so I won't list all the points here) - to read the full thing as text, visit the Media Guardian page, or alternatively watch the video here (jump to 36 minutes in for the start of the actual lecture). There's also a few interesting follow-up pieces on the subject floating around - from the Guardian tech weekly podcast with discussion of some key points, to this interesting post on the prospects for Google TV.

The move obviously makes sense for all parties concerned - especially for Youtube, which has yet to turn a profit since Google acquired it three years ago. This added feature (plus the removal of the headache of constant disputes over unlicensed content), should amount to a significantly healthier balance sheet - though there still remains plenty of content for which no deals are in place at the moment. Nonetheless, this marks a huge step forward in Youtube's progress towards reaching its full potential (i.e. blanket online video market domination).

The key thing for Youtube is to reach that tipping point of legal TV content, after which non-participating media producers will have less and less to gain from keeping their content exclusively for their own websites. Naturally Youtube haven't released a full breakdown of the ad revenue-sharing agreement which has been struck to finally appease those such as C4, but presumably it takes into account the fact that current ad revenue is only a fraction of what we can expect to see in the next few years - especially after such changes as this have been implemented.

There are of course plenty of worrying aspects about having such a dominant one-stop shop for all online video content (imagine if Murdoch bought it up for one...), but though such a thing might be possible with Youtube - it is by no means guaranteed, and will take some time before it can be realised regardless. However - there are monopoly worries which will surely creep into consideration, but that is a story for another time (and another year i expect).

What we are  here concerned with today is simply the fact that Youtube has grown legitimately bigger with a great new service, and from a users' point of view that can only be a good thing. Presumably the content will still be ring-fenced according to country access (no C4 show access from outside the UK for example), although if such a deal could be struck as to remove this barrier, then the Youtube's distribution potential would really start to look scary...

Dejan Levi