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YouTube Goes Hollywood, Adds MGM Catalog

It was only a matter of time. With Hulu.com a proven success for offering legitimate television and movie content online, YouTube, the one-time Web video innovator, needs to play catch up. It has made some movies from MGM's catalog available to viewers to watch for free.

Part of YouTube's early success was not that end users could create and upload their own content, but that you could easily find that Saturday Night Live clip from Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell, "The Chronicles of Narnia." Then the copyright holders stepped in and cried foul.

Since then, YouTube has actively sought out copyrighted content and expelled it from its servers, kowtowing to the wishes of the big media companies. That meant user-generated content took over. As good (and bad) as some user-generated content is, a lot of it is hard to sell advertising against. The effect? Despite the site's popularity, it has struggled to bring in the cash for now-owner Google. With this morning's announcement, it appears that things have come full circle.

In order to better capture ad dollars, and compete with the likes of Hulu.com, YouTube will begin offering some moves from the MGM studio. The movies will be free for users to watch, with advertising appearing next to the video as it plays.

Some of the movies available will be classics, such as The Magnificent Seven and older television programming, such as American Gladiators. There also will be clips of more modern and more popular films.

But that won't be enough to put YouTube on an even footing with Hulu, which is a joint venture between NBC and Fox. It is going to have to secure more television programming if it expects eyeballs to follow. To that end, according to the New York Times, Google is working on a deal with CBS. The deal will allow YouTube to post some television programs from CBS, which will include old Star Trek re-runs.

This is a first step for YouTube to surpass its current status as a repository for user-generated content and become a more mainstream player in content distribution. It also represents another step toward the future of "watching TV" on our PCs.

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