NewTube
NBC and Fox have announced that they will be launching a new video site this summer with free content from at least a dozen TV networks and two major film studios. This site is going to be amazing, free full length episodes of House, 24, the Simpsons and many other great shows. YouTube will still be the place for great, user generated, under 10 minute clips. It will no longer be the place to watch stolen clips from TV shows though, and that is probably a good thing. It will keep them from being sued into oblivion. I think that it is now clear Google overpayed, as videos of people dancing and puting mentos into diet coke will never be worth over a billion dollars. They paid for a site that had a near monopoly on online video and NBC's NewTube is going to be quickly just as popular as YouTube. As Newscorp COO Peter Chernin said, "this will be the largest advertising platform on earth". The name of this new entity has not been released yet.
AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! are all in on this deal, meaning that "96 percent of the monthly U.S. unique users on the Internet, will have unlimited access to the site’s vast library of content". This is a gigantic deal, all of the major internet players (minus Google) and many of the biggest traditional media companies have teamed up to out-do Google and YouTube. The question now is what will ABC and CBS, who have sat this deal out do about online content? Will they set up their own site, or will they partner with YouTube?
