Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt will give this year's MacTaggart lecture, the keynote address at the Edinburgh Television Festival in late August.
It is the first time in the 35-year history of the prestigious lecture series that the head of a technology company rather than someone from a television or broadcast background has given the MacTaggart.
YouTube is also one of the television festival's headline sponsors this year, along with longtime sponsor the Guardian, who made the announcement in a story last night.
Schmidt is expected to talk about how broadcasters and producers can benefit from the changing technologies of the internet, in particular mobile media consumption. No doubt, he will also be quizzed about copyright issues and content filtering.
Schmidt recently said that YouTube has 35 hours of video uploaded to it every minute, what he called "a truly amazing and disturbing statistic."