Hulu.com VS Youtube.com - The Showdown

Mark Immler

James Leach

Kimberly Kahanek
Bailey Klatt



We found it more difficult to find complete episodes of television programming on YouTube.com. In fact, some clips are quite misleading. When searching for a complete House episode, we found one that was listed as a full episode in the title. Once we began viewing the video we discovered found the episode was under three minutes long. At the bottom of the episode was a url banner for a third party web site that supposedly shows the full episodes. It was a video ad for another streaming video site. We though this was hard evidence against the validity of YouTube in a sense that there titles don't neccesarily describe what the video is about. There is limited or no regulation as well with misleading video titles. I think this is because the videos are mostly shown by third party users or just regular people online. Another qualm about YouTube we had was when we were again searching for a full episode of House. We found one but it had been removed due to copyright infringement. So why did that video come up when we searched? It should have been completely removed from their video database.




Both sites are great but different. Hulu offers quality professionally produced videos in their entirety at the cost of having to sit through a couple ads. Hulu's site is organized and clean. Its easy to use and has great content. YouTube provides an amateure video outlet that is often entertaining and creative. You know what your getting when you go to Hulu while with YouTube its up in the air. I think YouTube moving toward becoming more like Hulu is ok as long as they don't change the original site too much and what we have come to love from it. YouTube needs to maintain its reputation as an creative outlet that presents itself as being owned by the users of the sites. The users make the content and therefore make the site. They could create a branch of YouTube for the professional videos instead of throwing them in the mix with all the other stuff. They could gain more fans with more content, but lets not lose fans in the process.