Disrupting Innovation

YouTube, hoping to counter the competition from sites like NBC and Hulu, has started running full-length episodes of CBS programming.

Executives at the Google-owned video site told Reuters that CBS would handle ad sales for its shows and share the revenue with YouTube. In the meantime, CBS does not have a programming deal with Hulu, although the video site does direct users who search for that network’s shows back to the CBS site.

CBS has one of the most subscribed channels on YouTube, with 83,000 users signed up. The channel debuted two years ago and has recorded 4.2 million views. There are only four CBS shows currently available in the full-episode mode on YouYube-- Beverly Hills 90210, StarTrek: The Original Series, The Young and the Restless and MacGyver.

You can access the episodes from here, but geographic restrictions applies (US residents only).

I found an interesting article on the future relationship between Hulu and YouTube. I particurarly like the following line:

That's not to say that Hulu will ever supplant YouTube. On the contrary, I suspect that they will ultimately develop an interesting symbiotic relationship with each other, with YouTube being the home of the homemade, the obscure and the populist, with Hulu (or another site like it) aggregating the professional-grade productions from movie and television studios. That's not a bad combination for us consumers

What do you think ?
I think Hulu will eventually replace TV, not YouTube. It is about content. Hulu overlaps with the content type that people put on TV, it is a different distribution medium for it with greater reach that airwaves. YouTube is most community-generated content (along with pirating) and that makes its content different. With Hulu, the pirated content on YouTube may disappear, but I think that is what the guys at YouTube want in the first place.

The ideal is that people anywhere in the world should be able to see any content they want, without the limitation of IP banned websites like Hulu. It has been a long time that I have been waiting for this. It seems silly that cable companies in US sell you "channels". What people want to see are shows, I do not think people really care whether its Fox, ABC, NBC or whatever. It is about the shows. A good show is a good show no matter which channel broadcasts it.

Ever since Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube in October 2006, video-sharing sites have sprung up all over the web. But YouTube was not the first to set the online video craze rolling; among those video sites that are not YouTube, Metacafe has a good claim to be the pioneer in the field.

Cisco Systems made its own detailed projections in August of 2007. In “The Exabyte Era,” Cisco stated that “YouTube is just the beginning. Online video will experience three waves of growth.”

1.
The first wave is driven by YouTube and similar applications, which Cisco generalizes as Internet Video-to-PC.
By mid-2007, YouTube was streaming around 50 petabytes per month, or 600 petabytes (PB) per year. This was approximately ~7% of all U.S. Internet traffic. For another reference point, consider that all original broadcast and cable TV and radio content totals around 75 PB per year. YouTube streams that much data in 1.5 months. A Hi-Def YouTube would mean 12 exabytes per year, or almost as large as the entire U.S. Internet in 2007.

2.
The second wave is Internet Video-to-TV. Cisco believes this category, which includes IPTV (Joost, Hulu f.i.), will overtake the first wave in traffic volume by 2009.
Joost, led by former top Cisco executive Mike Volpi, and a number of similar services offer free, advertising-based TV over the Net. The networks have also begun parallel strategies focusing on the Internet: NBC, for example, streamed 50 million of its shows over the Net in October 2007. NBC Universal and News Corp. launched Hulu, a premium online video site that combines their considerable TV and film resources

3.
The third (and potentially largest) wave is Internet Video Communication, or video calling and conferencing.
By mid-2007, MSN Video Messenger was already generating 4 PB per month, or as much as the entire Internet in 1997. A move to video-phones would mean 300 exabytes—at least—or 30x the size of the existing U.S. Internet.
In coming years, we can easily imagine high-definition always-on “Virtual Windows” that open permanent visual portals across the globe.

My opinion is that Video content might be the king, but the telcos and cable companies will reign supreme in controlling the future of online video.

Extract from "Estimating the Exaflood - The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet – A ‘zettabyte’ by 2015? "

It seems to be a YouTube commercial. It is actually a good "piece of art" done by some students. Why big corporations pay millions of $$ to realize their commercials ?