YouTube Decides to Dance the Hulu

(MoneyWatch)  God it's fun being right. As I had speculated earlier this week, one way YouTube is going to get around its YouTub-iness (i.e. videos of restaurant workers sticking cheese up their nose), is to open a professional content site to go up against Hulu. To see it live, click here. Those relieved sighs you hear are coming from media companies and advertisers who finally have their own playpen within YouTube in which their content can reside safely and legally.

That said, at the outset it won't hold a candle to Hulu's library of reruns and first-run content. According to Mediaweek, even though it has signed some high profile media companies including Sony, Lionsgate and BNET Media's ultimate owner, CBS, much of the content is more than a decade old, so right now, unless you're really into watching reruns of "The Addams Family" and "Married with Children" this isn't the right site for you. And some of it is pretty obscure -- I'd never even heard of "Happy Tree Friends" (above) which apparently is a Flash-based cartoon that, per Wikipedia, features violent deaths that are "comparable to that of The Itchy & Scratchy Show ... [but] the portrayal of death in Happy Tree Friends is usually more graphic and anatomically correct, depicting bloodshed and dismemberment in more vivid and often exaggerated detail."

But I digress. The opening of this site is another positive step for YouTube, which, earlier this month, also announced plans for a dedicated music video site, to be called Vevo. When you consider how rapidly Hulu has come along, and been able to attract advertisers, it seems possible that creating walled gardens planted with professional content provided by the actual content providers may be the only way that YouTube ever makes real money. It has had three-and-a-half years to create a viable, self-supporting business model for the main YouTube site; the fact it hasn't been able to develop one yet may mean that it doesn't exist.