According to reports, Youtube is planning a redesign of its website and player to highlight its professional content more prominently. It looks like Youtube has hulu envy.
YouTube will soon unveil a redesign that clearly separates its premium and long-form programming from the user-posted videos that account for most of its activity.
According to two sources familiar with Google’s plans for YouTube, the new design will do away with the current navigation scheme — which funnels users into “videos,” “channels,” and “community” categories. That layout will be replaced with a tabbed navigation with clearly defined sections for professional content.
The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google’s network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising. Meanwhile the Videos channel will house amateur and semi-pro content of the sort major brand advertisers have shied away from.
“They’re putting up walls between all the UGC stuff, which will live within the video channel,…and the brand safe content,” said one senior agency exec who was briefed on YouTube’s plans.
The redesign also touches YouTube’s video player. The new player interface closely resembles the video experience on Hulu, the News Corp.- and NBCU-owned video portal that’s grown by leaps and bounds since its launch last year. Like Hulu, the new video player displays visual markers in places where ads are scheduled to play. Also like Hulu, the YouTube player allows users to “dim the lights,” reducing the brightness of screen real estate outside the video frame.
“It’s totally a Hulu approach, but that’s best practices right now,” said the exec.
In a related news disney is in talks with youtube to license its content excluding it from hulu. If this deal materializes it would be a big win for youtube and a blow to hulu. It would also mean more fragmentation of professional video between hulu, tv.com and youtube.
The Walt Disney Company and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are close to one programming deal for video portal YouTube, and are in discussions about another—also involving YouTube—that would preclude a deal with Hulu, paidContent has learned.
Disney (NYSE: DIS) and YouTube are in the final stages of negotiations to put clips from ESPN, ABC and other Disney assets on YouTube, according to sources familiar with the situation. The two companies would share revenue, with Disney controlling the ad inventory; YouTube and Google could get some inventory to sell. As important, YouTube would refer back to ESPN.com, ABC.com and the other Disney sites. Disney declined comment; a YouTube spokesman said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation.
In addition, the two are discussing a full-episode deal—a multi-year pay-for-play deal that would put ABC and some other Disney programming on YouTube instead of NBC Universal-News Corp (NYSE: NWS) joint venture Hulu. I am told these discussions have gone as high as Disney CEO Bob Iger and Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt but that they are not as far along as the short-form deal—or as advanced as Disney’s negotiations with Hulu.
These two moves are probably related and shows youtube’s strategy revolves aroung copying hulu.
Update: PaidContent reports that Disney and Youtube deal is official for short form videos. Full episodic videos are still under discussion.
The Walt Disney (