What the Hulu is Hulu doing on YouTube?

Picture ABC taking out an ad for itself during CBS' prime time. Or the Dodgers setting up a merchandise booth at AT&T Park. Or no, how about Coke adding themselves to Pepsi's Wikipedia entry. Yeah, that's it.

Hulu, the Fox/NBC Universal online TV destination and one of YouTube's direct competitors, has established a popular channel in the heart of its rival's territory. The Hulu channel contains dozens of million-plus hit clips from Fox shows like "Family Guy" and "The Moment of Truth," as well as NBC's "The Office."  The YouTube clips are branded to the hilt with Hulu graphics and ad text.

This looks almost bizarrely incongruous just a couple of weeks after Hulu CEO Jason Kilar totally ripped on YouTube during a presentation at the NAB, where he showed a slide from a clip of "Felicity" someone posted and said, according to CNET's account, "the only way to get (Felicity) is from unauthorized sources."

Moreover, NBC pulled down its YouTube channel and all its contents in October, just before Hulu launched. 

(Note to Wikians:  I reverted it immediately.)

Comments

[SludgeHeap]

Well, Hulu is pushing viral embedding, but this is a surprise. Does the advertising model work through the YouTube clips? If so, I guess it increases the kind of viewership they need, as revenue is based upon cost per million. So more eyeballs means more revenue.

Maybe the branding issue isn't so ackward - Hulu is a "brand" providing content through the YouTube portal, which has no original content of its own. It could probably be compared to Hulu placing ads on search engines - except isn't YouTube content usually hosted on their own servers? Hulu already has delivery agreements with other "branded" websites and can be found in all sorts of smaller websites like this one:
http://series.airwolf.tv/episodes (who didn't love Airwolf?)
So there are all sorts of ways that Hulu content is getting out there. I guess Hulu's dealings are moving at the speed of cyberspace.

[Rocker]

No disconnect here. The clips on YouTube are entertaining, but it seems to me the purpose of the exercise is to advertise Hulu to YouTube users and drive them over to Hulu.com for the "main course"...ie; whole episodes.

[Colin Donald]

Guess they've decided to treat YouTube as a frienemy - ironic, given that senior execs were openly attacking YT and Google earlier in the year, in order to position Hulu as a video search engine in its own right:

http://tinyurl.com/3cy8o7