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NBC Partners with YouTube

June 28th, 2006

On June 27, 2006 Paul Taylor of MSNBC wrote:

NBC, the General Electric-owned US media group, has formed a strategic partnership with YouTube, the fast- growing US video and social networking company. [source]

On June 26, 2006 TechCrunch reported a partnership between Time Warner at Guba. [source] … which has a fairly restrictive set of requirements for watching premium video content:

With our sincerest apologies to non-United States and Apple, Linux and other non-Windows users, in order to enjoy the GUBA Premium service, you must be located in the United States, and use Windows 2000 or XP with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher, which support the Windows Media Digital Rights Management System as required by our premium content providers. We will add other DRM support as soon as it becomes available and approved by major premium content providers. [source]

Hopefully the NBC / YouTube partnership will not attempt to sell videos with such restrictive DRM. It will probably be promotional only and in flash format which will enable playback on several PC platforms but will preclude portable playback with the iPod or PSP.

I think that the most interesting aspect of the NBC / YouTube partnership will be our ability to track the popularity of NBC content against YouTube’s vast collection of user generated content. Will Brook Broadack be more popular than Conan Obrien?

If this partnership goes well by YouTube driving more traffic to NBC or even if it does not go well with YouTube continuing to take audience from NBC, I expect NBC to be moving in to acquire YouTube.

NBC is very interested in the Brook Broadack audience. Carson Daly Productions recently signed her with an 18-month overall programming development deal. [source] This may help them in the short term … in the long term consumers will continue to shift their attention from NBC to online outlets like YouTube and to the thousands of independently produced video blogs.

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