As Chris briefly noted earlier this morning, MGM has confirmed last week’s CNET rumors and announced that they’re slowly rolling some of their feature film library on to YouTube. But the New York Times story about this, by Brad Stone and the always-skeptical Brooks Barnes, warns us not to get too excited — because MGM certainly isn’t.
“The initial lineup may not be all that compelling,” the authors admit — highlights include full-length streams of Bulletproof Monk and clips from Legally Blonde — but this may be because MGM doesn’t feel compelled to give YouTube the good stuff. Noting that many studios are cranky about YouTube’s past perceived leinance on copyright enforcement (a perception which they’re now vigorously trying to reverse), dissatisfied with the overall look and feel of the site and skeptical over its as-yet-unproven potential as a revenue generator, the authors quote MGM’s bet-hedging co-president, Jim Packer:
But he did not see putting a significant part of the studio’s catalog on the site anytime soon.“We will have some long-form videos up on YouTube, but I don’t think that’s the platform to have 30 or 40 movies up at once,” Mr. Packer said. “I feel much more comfortable doing that on a site like Hulu.”
One of Hulu’s obvious advantages is that there’s no non-professional/user-generated content to compete with, which makes it a playing field much more familiar to mainstream distributors. So why put a hand in YouTube at all? It’s like they know they should court YouTube (think about the marketshare left abandoned on the table if they don’t), but they’re just not that attracted to her. YouTube is the girl that MGM (and other studios) are going to call once a month and take out to a sub-par restaurant, just so that they can keep her in the game in case there’s an unforeseen catastrophe somewhere down the road. Until then, they’re saving all their love for Hulu.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth