IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Electus, News Corp.'s ShineReveille unit, RTL Group's FremantleMedia Ltd., as well as skateboarding legend Tony Hawk and "CSI" creator Anthony Zuiker, will be among the partnerships Google will announce in the coming week for YouTube.  Besides these content partnerships, YouTube will be revamped to become "channel-centric," encouraging visitors to subscribe to one of 20 or so categories such as food, comedy and news, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The YouTube Channels kicks off as a number of trends promise to make online video companies’ next big branding vehicle.

Spending on digital video advertising is poised to increase. Casale Media has published a research brief showing that advertisers and agencies will increase spending on digital video advertising by 25% over the next 12 months and would amount to about 23.8% of total online ad budgets.

Also, it is not just Google that is encouraging brands to step up their online video outreach to consumers — platform providers such as AOL are as well.

The numbers for online video cannot be ignored: According to figures from comScore Media Metrix, Americans logged about 6.9 billion online video viewing sessions in August, roughly tying the all-time record set in July and an increase of about 33% from 5.7 billion in August 2010. On a year-over-year basis, unique online video viewership grew about 1.5%, from 177 million.