Well, this is pretty interesting. From the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story:
News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends, according to people close to the negotiations.
The two companies enlisted help from some of Google’s biggest Internet rivals. The News Corp.-NBC Universal partnership has deals with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and News Corp.’s MySpace to place videos in front of their collective audience of hundreds of millions.
Despite Hollywood’s dismal track record in creating successful joint ventures, these players see little choice but to band together to compete against Google and Apple Inc., which are becoming powerful distributors of entertainment.
My tendency has been to focus on the “dismal track record” when it comes to Big Media and the Internet. I think people (or at least Internet users) prefer using neutral, third-party gateways to media content. But that’s not always true: It always makes our day here at Time when a link to one of our online stories goes up on the CNN.com homepage. It’s not a neutral gateway, but it sure gets a lot of traffic.
I do know, though, that since Viacom pulled all its Daily Show and Colbert Report clips from YouTube, I don’t watch those clips anymore. It’s too much of a pain to find anything on the Comedy Central site (although, I noticed upon visiting just now, it does seem to be improving). Which is something NewsNBCUniversalTube better work on.
Update: Thanks to commenter Jim for his words and for pointing me to Lev’s post on the same topic, which is similar to but, I’m afraid to say, smarter than this one.