A little confession.
In 2007, I was addicted to watching the Youtube video of James Marsden's singing 'always on my mind' in Ally Mcbeal. It was so dreamy that I felt like he was singing for me.
But, one day, Youtube pulled down that video clip after Fox tried to sue Youtube for infringement. I panicked and got so mad at Fox. I understand that it's Fox's proper move to protect their intellect property. I just think that before making any moves, Fox should have gotten their own video website where people can easily search video clips and watch all the shows.
Fortunately, my frustration didn't last long. Last year, I stumbled on 'Hulu' website which was the joint venture among Fox, NBC, MGM, Warner Bros, Sony Pictures and other 100 partners. It allowed me to watch all the episodes of my favorite shows including 'The office', '30 Rock'... (Some past episodes are not easy to look up though) Since then, I've been partially migrating from Youtube to Hulu. I don't mind watching some ads as long as I can get back to James Marsden's song.
I guess I am not the only one. According to Financial times and Economist, Hulu is catching up with Youtube so fast. Here is the story on the Hulu's new business model.
It is true that Youtube has been hard at work rolling out advertising solutions to monetize its popularity because user generated content doesn't attract that many large scale brand advertisers, whereas Hulu already has more than 100 big brand advertisers including McDonald's, Best Buy, BOA...
To look for the silver lining here, it seems like that professional content still has a lot more value than 'user generated content'.
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