YouTube to become "CorporationTube"?

[Iced_Bullet]

 

There has been widespread speculation that a dramatic redesign of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube site is on the way - and possibly as soon as this week.

 

 

Stifel Nicolaus analyst George Askew notes today that that the announcement is rumored to be scheduled for April 16 - the same day the company will report Q1 results. The speculation is that existing navigation will be scrapped, with a new design featuring four tabs: three featuring “premium content,” categorized as Movies, Music or Shows, and a fourth simply labeled Videos for user-generated content. Askew notes that the idea is to improve monetization on the site, although he adds that “questions linger as to whether this will undermine the differentiated, community aspects” of the site.

 

 

Basically, Google is going to Hulu-ize the site, by placing a great emphasis on professonal content, which is an easier sell to advertisers than, say, Chimpanzee Riding A Segway or my personal favorite,

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For us, the British Users, the Music tabs will become useless as we can't watch music videos ¬.¬ We'll have to use unofficial user channels to view the videos, I guess.

 

Any views?

 

My views are kind of summed up by the video ^.

[t.]

Record labels, movie studios, TV companies. All late comers to the .com party. Rather than trying to utilise the internet for their benefit early on they sat and demonised it as a world of pirates where no one was willing to pay their own way.

 

Eventually after the promise of crippling DRM the music labels gave way to iTunes, Rhapsody etc and began making big money, with downloads accounting for more music sales than the hard copies. Traffic statistics came out and we were told they showed that legal had over taken illegal. Now thanks to services like Netflix and iTunes and others they are seeing the light, but as before they will pussy foot into it with regional lock outs and DRM.

 

In time I expect the barriers may lower, perhaps not entirely because of deals between TV channels and how they sell their shows to a global audience. But to an extent I expect.

 

I say what I think, I may likely be proved wrong.