Youtube and Hulu

I've used both of these sites before, so I didn't really find anything new on either. I originally went to Hulu to watch last night's episode of The Daily Show, but on the homepage under "Popular Clips" I saw the video "Celebrity Jeopardy: Stewart, Reynolds and Connery" from SNL. This happens to be one of my favorite skits from SNL, so I decided to watch that first. An ad played before the clip, followed by an uninterrupted version of the entire skit.

So, when I went to YouTube I decided to see if I could find a video of that same SNL clip. I typed "celebrity jeopardy: stewart, reynolds, connery" into the search bar, just to see what would come up. The first video result, which I watched, was titled "SNL celebrity jeopardy burt reynolds, french stewart, sean connery." There was no ad before the video, but it just ended up being a video of someone filming a video of the skit on Hulu playing on their computer. This seems like a blatant violation of copyright law to me, and was also not of very good quality since it was just someone filming a copy of the video on their computer. To me, I would rather deal with an ad or two and get higher quality from Hulu than watch something like this on YouTube.

In the end though, I think the sites serve different purposes. Hulu seems to have a more commercial purpose. It's filled mostly with longer commercial videos, such as TV shows, movies, and also small clips or previews from TV shows and movies; these often have either ads at the beginning or ads spaced throughout (much like commercial breaks on television). YouTube, on the other hand, seems to be better for shorter non-commercial purposes such as viral videos and user-submitted content--that's what I mostly use it for, anyways. However, YouTube does have some commercial clips (such as movie previews and music videos) from companies that contain ads, and Hulu does contain its fair share of smaller productions and web shows (such as "Dorm Life").