Hulu and YouTube: Catching Up and Its Implications

November 20, 2008

NBC and its media pals are trying to catch up with YouTube.com. I am not a video addict, and I don’t pay much attention to video search and video serving sites. We put video on the Web in 1995 with some of the Auto Channel’s com engineers. We learned that it was a bandwidth pig, and unless you knew exactly what you were doing with codecs, you could spend a lot of dough and trigger an avalanche of email from cranky users. I scanned TechDirt’s “Hulu To Catch YouTube–Great but So What?” here. The peg for the article was the Financial Times’s story about this arms race. What I overlooked in my own analysis of the dual was the question, “So what?” The TechDirt point was that there is sufficient room in the market for user generated videos and the slicker mind candy that Hulu pumps out. I’m going to make this insight my own. GigaOM’s comments about Web video as an “inexact science” are germane to this great race.

Stephen Arnold, November 20, 2008

Comments

Comments are closed.

  • Archives

  • Recent Posts

  • Meta