YouTube is one of the tentpoles of the Web at this point in time, being a household name and one of the most-visited sites on the Internet. And yet Yahoo is reportedly planning to compete with YouTube by launching its own online video service. The fools.

YouTube Competition

YouTube is a giant amongst giants. It’s owned by Google, racks up 1 billion visitors every month who collectively watch 6 billion hours of video every month, and pushes out 100 hours of new content every minute.

That’s one hell of an achievement, and it makes YouTube a seemingly impossible scalp to take. It is for this reason that YouTube has hardly any competition.

There are lots of other video sites on the Web — Vimeo, Dailymotion, and Metacafe to name just three — but none that can compete in terms of content or eyeballs. Only a foolish company would even contemplate the idea of trying to beat YouTube at its own game…

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Web video is maturing, with original programming coming to online content companies. Following hot on the heels of the likes of Netflix, Yahoo! is getting into the original programming game with Electric City.

Electric City

Tom Hanks has had a series in mind for many years, but he’s been waiting for the right opportunity to get it out to the public. That opportunity has now arrived thanks to the Internet.

According to the Associated Press, Electric City will premiere on Yahoo! in the spring. There will be 20 episodes, each 3- to 4-minutes long, of the animated series which taps into social issues.

Gary Goetzman, co-founder of Playtone, Hanks’ production company, said, “It was always our intent to have this project live and breathe online, and we felt Yahoo! would be the perfect home.”

Yahoo! has been upping its original content, but Electric City represents its first foray into scripted programming.

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Hulu is being sold off, of that there is no question. But everything else, it would seem, is being questioned. From the chances of achieving profitability to the possibility that the content will vanish from the company’s grasp in the future.

Hulu Bids Incoming

The deadline for bidders to submit the figure they are willing to pay to acquire Hulu has reportedly been extended from until the end of the week. This is to allow potential buyers more time to study the financials of the company to ensure they stack up against the considerable asking price.

Hulu is looking for bids in the region of $2 billion, which would seem excessive when revenue has only just hit $500 million for the year and profitability is still some way off. There are also other questions being asked by those in the know, especially related to the longterm future of the business.

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Yahoo’s Yahoo! Connected TV platform may be set to get some licensed video-on-demand content from Disney. That’s the same Disney which has blocked Google TV from accessing its content. Then again, this content may not be that good.

Connected TV Platforms

Connected TV platforms are coming at us thick and fast, with the likes of Apple (Apple TV), Google (Google TV), and Boxee (Boxee Box) having released their own in recent months, and that’s just a small selection of those now on offer to consumers.

Yahoo! Connected TV has been with us for a while, and is currently available in 70 different models of television. However, the apps available on it up to now have mostly been widgets (read Web apps) such as those for Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. In other words, not video content.

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As part of an extensive series of cuts and closures at Yahoo!, Yahoo! Video is closing its doors, or as Yahoo! so sweetly puts it, is “changing.” So that’s thousands more people heading to YouTube for their online video, surely.

Yahoo! Evolving

Yahoo! is currently undergoing an extreme change, with those in charge, particularly CEO Carol Bartz, attempting to make deep cuts in order to save money and keep the company chugging along into the far future.

The last week has seen hundreds of staff told their soon to be out of a job, while various products under the Yahoo! banner are being closed or combined with others. Controversially, those being closed include De.licio.us and MyBlogLog.

And it looks as though Yahoo! Video is affected as well.

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Online video is growing ever more popular, particularly in the United States. But it’s YouTube which continues to drive market penetration, with Hulu leading the rest of the growing pack.

Online Video Viewer Stats

Online video is showing no signs of slowing down in growth. As the latest comScore statistics for December 2009 show.

178 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video during the last month of the decade. Which equates to almost 87 percent market penetration.

Between them they watched over 33 billion videos in December, or the equivalent of 187 videos each. The average length of video now stands at 4.1 minutes, up from 3.5 minutes around the same time last year.

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DeliTV is a Yahoo Pipe created by Tony Hirst, a lecturer at The Open University in the UK.

This pipe allows anyone to program their own online TV channel from Boxee by bookmarking pages on Delicious with the tag “delitv”.

• Yahoo Pipes is a tool that aggregates and manipulates all sorts of content from the web.
• Boxee is free software that streams content from sites like MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr on a laptop or connected to a TV.

DeliTV supports:

• BBC iPlayer category feeds
• podcast feeds
• Youtube videos
• Youtube Playlists
• Youtube channels
• another DeliTV playlist
• an MP3 file

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