This doesn’t make any sense - at all.

In order to pose serious threat of competition with you tube, the News Corp and NBC Universal are launching a free online service, very recently. This will feature long movies, video clips from best and popular television networks in numbers. News Corp…

Someone else is willing to do your content distribution, why try and stop them?

The user-generated content part of YouTube is mostly absolute garbage, its greatest success — the lonelygirl15 saga — made Joanie Loves Chachi look like high quality viewing fare by comparison.

hooTube?

tiedTube?

FoxTube?

payTube?

SnoozeTube?

fox.tv ?

I’ll refrain from speculating on what the impact will be, but it wouldn’t be too surprising to find this ignored by the masses, who turn out to be bored by ‘pro’ content and instead prefer random odd snippets…

I’ve also been a Joost beta user for the last few months and I can tell you that Joost is a completely different animal on the user experience side (can’t tell you about the business side). It’s full-screen TV, on demand, but your choices are limited to the Joost content so far. And so far, the content is mostly youth culture-driven and not incredibly alluring to this 40-something….

Yahoo focused on Categories and let Google power their Search. Inktomi was also a Technology provider for Yahoo and noticed that Google was focusing on becoming a destination site and focusing on search. They warned Yahoo about Google as competition, but Yahoo was quite confident that they were the end all destination site.

Inktomi went as far as to rent a Truck with a billboard which red “Google is stealing your customers.”

Yahoo ignored Inktomi and the rest is history.

Ultimately, this will be a competitor to Joost - and Joost already provides a monetary way to reimburse the studios. No one really watches feature length movies or shows on YouTube. It would be better to show low quality clips on YouTube and then have a link where you can watch the better quality clip on Joost or this new service. However, corporate greed will bog down this new service with fees and limitations and keep it from gaining any traction - IMHO.

The bottom line is that content is king and people will go where the content is. If Google’s arrogance limits its success in acquiring the legal rights to content and you can no longer easily obtain the free copyrighted video on YouTube that originally made it a popular draw for the mainstream user, you’ll go to the services where you can obtain it. I think it’s naive to expect that YouTube has such great brand loyalty that people will stick by it when the content they really want is available elsewhere. Crude analogy: if I have a nightclub where the most beautiful women in the world go and there’s 3 women for every man and then all the beautiful women leave and the female/male ratio goes to 1:3, is my nightclub going to be as popular? YouTube’s a nightclub and when the pretty people leave for other clubs, so will most of the patrons. Will YouTube die? Not likely. But it’s apparently going to have to face a more competitive market, and the participants in this deal are smart because they are supposedly going to strike distribution deals (or already have) with other popular and upstart online services that want their content and are willing to act reasonably in terms of compensation. It does not appear that the networks are going to build a single destination site to compete with YouTube and leave it at that. If they do build their own distribution platform/network, it’s a very smart move and Google should be a little bit more concerned about the impact on their $1.65 billion investment.

Given that YouTube, a startup founded by two young guys, beat Google Video in less than two years, I wonder if Google executives laughed at the threat YouTube posed to them when they saw YouTube for the first time. Perhaps they didn’t call it Clown Co. but I wouldn’t be surprised if they said “Those kids don’t have the resources to beat us.” Will history come back to bite Google in the arse again?

Google just doesn’t have the opportunity to expand into ad- or subscription-driven network content. It’s not the end of the world for them.

News Corp: already owns MySpace, including its video feature (#2 on the web after YT). Can anyone tell me what they’ve brought to the table over there? Nothing decipherable. The site is still the clunky piece of crap it was before they bought it.

NBC: erm, anybody checked the ratings lately….like since “Friends” went off the air?

Viacom: “ME HUNGRY! WANT OWN STUFF!”

Sony: a nice little project to get their minds off of Apple and Microsoft.

Gimme a break. This venture is just another example of the TV industrial complex (thank you, Seth Godin) dinosaurs grasping at straws and leeching onto any “hawt” trend the kiddies are into. Once again they will prove that the only thing they know how to do is to throw money at stuff and hope it works–it won’t.

http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

Killing YouTube and killing their userbase are on opposite ends of the spectrum in my opinion. The guys behind Firesidechats and any other UGC will always have an avenue for their work.

Take these guys who produce Firesidechats (a hilarious sketch comedy show on YouTube) for example. With YouTube, they have an audience, and therefore they have an incentive to produce. If a competitor is created that kills the YouTube userbase, these guys would be hard-pressed to produce any more of their content.

Take this awesome short for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnRw0-d3lJw