What has been dubbed as Clown Co. is now official, though no word what the domain will be? This press release has confirmed what many people have been dubbing as the partnership that could tumble down YouTube.

News Corporation and NBC Universal will launch the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled with the most sought-after content from television and film. The video-rich site will debut this summer with thousands of hours of full-length programming, movies and clips, representing premium content from at least a dozen networks and two major film studios.

Initially the distribution partners will be AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo. I guess they are only looking to target mostly U.S audiences for the launch who will have unlimited access to the site’s content. I hope they don’t forget about the rest of us 880 million international users.

The lineup includes – Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break and more.

They are primed to be located in New York and Los Angeles.

I think this is either going to really work or completely bomb. But taking into account that most of the partner sites have millions of users the ad revenues will probably ride on some sort of embedded ads or site ads themselves.

The number one reason why YouTube doesn’t make as much money as it could is because they don’t have ads on their videos which are embedded all over the internet and cost them some serious bandwidth usage.

So how will Google respond to this, well they have till summer to figure it out before the launch. But my guess is they will wait till the launch and then counter launch at the same time – that would be the smartest marketing move.

What about Joost? Anybody got a beta invite I could try?

EDIT: I think this is just as ignorant as corporate America can get. From the notes on techcrunch you can read the below highlights –

“Chernin: this will be the largest advertising platform on earth.” then they say
” Financial Times: Any plans to focus outside of U.S.? Do you think that this will hurt broadcast revenue? – U.S. is focus for now. They believe this will not cannibalize broadcast revenues.” – so that leaves me and 900 million others out. Which means they will NOT be the largest advertising platform on earth.

” – most movies will be available for sale. Some deep content will be free.”

“Washington Post: Are you talking to YouTube to partner? Is this a YouTube Killer?
- Chernin: This is obviously not a YouTube Killer. There’s no stand alone site. Seriously IP protection”

and then near the end this

“InternetNews: what kinds of advertising?
- we will experiment. want to maximize our monetization. want to provide users with a great experience.”

So clearly you can see the service is nothing to write home about and frankly like I said on frantic industries –

Remember this site will be run with a corporate mindset rather than a thinking system to expand user base in the long run.

The first thing on their mind is the bottom line and that’s where they will fail, unless they think outside the box.

Sadly they didn’t think outside the box.

Technorati Tags: online video, youtube, web 2.0, myspace, joost

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.