YouTube's Killer Killed by Its Own Videos

Hulu is supposed to be the new YouTube killer, but it seems that this new threat for Google's video sharing service might face a pretty important problem. Hulu's videos are available on other similar services such as AOL, MSN and MySpace, obviously with the approval of the copyright holders. In case you missed the news, Hulu plans to compete with YouTube using only copyrighted content and famous traditional videos such as The Simpsons, Prison break, Sideways and many other TV series. But as Mark Hendrickson from TechCrunch wrote on the official website, an important part of the Hulu videos are already available on AOL Video, obviously for free.

But Hulu's owners know about it and apparently, they made a strategic move. In the press release rolled out today, it is mentioned that Hulu signed a deal with several YouTube-like technologies to allow them to provide its videos until Hulu goes out in the wild.

"While Hulu.com is debuting in private beta, consumers will be able to also visit Hulu's vast network of distribution partner websites: AOL, Comcast's Fancast.com, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! to enjoy the extensive library of premium long-form and clip content. Together, these companies represent some of the most visited web destinations, bringing content to consumers where they are already spending much of their time," it is mentioned in the press release.

As you can see, there's no YouTube among the Hulu partners. In fact, NBC, one of the main video providers for Hulu, removed its YouTube channel last week in a move which was clearly supposed to bring Google's users on the Hulu page. Now, I'm thinking that Hulu's owners preferred to give its content to other YouTube rivals in order to steal its users and prepare them for the big release of its technology.

But what's very interesting is that some videos published on AOL Video might be geographically restricted as the same source mentioned above stated. It seems that another TechCrunch editor who lives in Australia got the following error while attempting to access a clip posted on AOL Video: "The requested video cannot be displayed in your region."