Hulu.com YouTube.com's Newest Competitor

A new competitor to YouTube.com, Hulu.com, is offering full length videos to attract more viewers away from their competitors. While YouTube.com offers short clips of many shows and trailers from movies, Hulu.com is offering full movies and episodes of TV shows in addition to the clips of shows and movie trailers featured on YouTube.com. YouTube.com is still the place to go if you want to watch videos uploaded by individuals, but if you wanted to watch any TV or movies Hulu.com is the place for you. USA Today is reporting that Hulu.com has made licensing deals with Warner Bros., Lionsgate, the National Basketball Association, and the Nation Hockey League. In addition to the licensing deals they have, they are also working to get deals with Viacom and CBS. Hulu.com is also praised by advertisers, who say they like that they can allow viewers to self-target the advertisements they watch, which saves the companies money in attempting to target the ads themselves.

Hulu.com is currently featuring full-length movies including Ice Age, Me, Myself & Irene, The Usual Suspects, Sideways, and The Big Lebowski, as well as many other movies and clips from movies. TV shows included on Hulu.com are The Simpsons, Family Guy, House, King of the Hill, MadTV, The Addams Family, and Three Sheets, as well as many others and clips from many shows. They are lacking any home-made videos though, which is a large part of YouTube.com, so all the people who enjoy uploading videos and those who enjoy watching them will stay with YouTube.com, while those who enjoy watching TV shows and movies will most likely prefer Hulu.com. However, YouTube.com is likely to change and add the full-length content from Hulu.com in order to better compete.

Because of the success of YouTube.com and other video sharing sites this is a rapidly growing business idea. This is one of the newest adaptations to online videos, in addition to many TV networks making the most recently aired episodes available, and there will probably be more changes to come. There is a large market, and fairly few start-up costs, Hulu.com has had over five million viewers in the last month even though they haven't had any marketing. There are more and more sites and if they want to stay in business they will have to be unique in some way to keep viewers coming back to their site instead of going to others. While it seems now that YouTube.com has the majority of the business and is what McDonald's is to fast food to online video.