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You’ve got to feel bad for YouTube.  After becoming the Internet’s darling for such fun gags, it wants to get a day job.  No longer content with just the clearing house for pranks and short clips, it wants to be in the full length movie business as well as the TV show business. 

YouTube served up this kind of content at one time but was forced to take most of it down over copyright claims.  Now YouTube is working with Hollywood to gain their trust and their content.

But it isn’t an easy road.  Sure YouTube has the traffic, 81 million folks in September, but they also have the baggage.  And it’s more than just past indiscretions.

Hulu is a bright, clean, snappy site that just feels “pro.”  The movie execs obviously feel at ease working with Hulu largely on that presentation.  YouTube is almost the antithesis of Hulu.  It is crowded, busy, and not set up for browsing movies other than simple text searches.

So, it isn’t that much of a surprise that studios are hesitant to do anything with YouTube.  MGM announced they’d be streaming full length movies on YouTube, but are treating it more like a first date.  Instead of being giddy about 81 million viewers (compared to Hulu’s 6.3 million), co-president of the studio, Jim Packer had this little gem to give you YouTube the beat-down:

“We will have some long-form videos up on YouTube, but I don’t think that’s the platform to have 30 or 40 movies up at once,” Mr. Packer said. “I feel much more comfortable doing that on a site like Hulu.”

Over at Hulu.com, MGM has about 62 full length movies including such hits as “Some like it hot,” “The Adams Family,” and my personal fave “The Three Amigos.”  Nothing ground breaking or fresh but some classics.  Surely the rental value from partners like Blockbuster is very low, so why not take the chance on something new for these titles?

Can old content really test what online streaming of movies and TV shows can do?  With the excitement around Netflix porting their service to every box with a cord as of late, I still believe the number of movies streamed (strum?) to these various boxes is small.  The reason for this mostly lies on little content.

I believe it is pretty clear that online streaming of TV shows and movies is the future.  The temptation of ultra-targeted advertising coupled with low delivery costs makes this concept a winner.  As compression tech gets better and everything gets faster, the switch will be quick and all consuming.  So YouTube wants to be in the game.

Can YouTube rebrand itself as the place to watch legit movies and shows?  Would a YouTube Pro be more suitable to such a venture?  Will YouTube go down as one big fad or just stay the king of user-generated content?  Time will tell.

Read [NYTimes]