Is This Significant?: YouTube Unveils Its TV/Film Channel

Late last week brought big news for YouTube, currently the online home of the baby panda sneeze and, of course, Susan Boyle, who's at well over 50 million views now, if you combine all the versions of the video.

YouTube (owned by Google) launched new offerings in TV and movies, which it's getting through partnerships with Sony, CBS and others. With this move, YouTube is trying to put the brakes on the growth of sites like Hulu, which have found a lot of success with online offerings of licensed content — particularly television shows, though they have some movie offerings as well.

So, aside from the fact that the news provides an opportunity to link to the panda-sneezing video: Is this significant?

The meaning of Alf and the final verdict, after the jump...

 

Why it is: Hulu gets a lot of buzz and praise, but YouTube is still the skittish elephant to Hulu's surprisingly unsettling mouse. According to March numbers from Nielsen Online, Hulu's fast growth brought it to nearly 350 million streams for the month, which sounds like a pretty big number, until you notice that YouTube had 5.5 billion streams for the same month. That's billion, with a B.

The new YouTube "Shows" channel (see it here) is a close copy of Hulu, and the player looks better and offers more viewing options than the regular YouTube player. With the large number of people who still think of YouTube as the natural destination for online video, its development of arm-in-arm relationships with Hollywood to provide licensed content potentially leads it down the road of Hulu-killing.

Why It Isn't: Hulu isn't popular because of its player, or because it theoretically has access to content through agreements with partners. It's popular, in large part, because of the content it actually offers — which the YouTube channel, for now, cannot touch.

Hulu offers recent episodes of popular shows from House to The Office to The Daily Show. YouTube, on the other hand, so far has nothing current in terms of network content except CBS's Harper's Island. Beyond that, there's a lot of ALF and Charlie's Angels and MacGyver. And there are only so many intergalactic-puppet enthusiasts.

It's not that there aren't people who love old shows, but the most popular content on Hulu is the new stuff, not the vault where old shows (including many of the same series they have on YouTube) are stored.

(So far, neither channel has enough movie offerings to make that part of the story a particularly big deal. That will break in one direction or another someday, but it's hard to predict how.)

A final limitation on the "Shows" channel: Thus far, YouTube doesn't seem to offer embedding capabilities on this content. That means that if I want to stick a video right here in the post for you to watch, I couldn't do it through YouTube. It's not clear whether this will last forever, but as long as it applies, it's a disadvantage.

The final verdict: Significant (eventually). In the short term, as long as recent TV and movies aren't available, this shouldn't make a huge difference. For now, YouTube is still the home of the self-injuring skateboarder and the college student rocking out to "Viva La Vida" on his webcam.

But in the long term, as the offerings grow more comparable, the structural advantage of starting out with 10 times as much business is likely to give YouTube an edge that potentially changes the landscape for sanctioned, ad-supported content by funneling that traffic back to the giant YouTube/Google vortex.