When Hulu was launched as a joint venture between NBC and Fox last October, YouTube suddenly became their enemy – NBC even deleted it’s YouTube channel and all of the content.
However, it seems there is now an official Hulu channel on YouTube. It was started on March 3rd, but has only now been noticed by The LA Times.
March 3rd places the channel’s launch date just prior to Hulu launching publicly, after it’s trial beta version. So what is a Hulu channel doing on one of, if not the biggest rival it has?
Planned All Along
Hulu spokesperson Christina Lee told NewTeeVee:
“It was absolutely planned by Hulu. We know that there are opportunities to find audiences all over the web. These are short promotional clips and we’re working with NBC and FOX on this.”
Bizarre Yet Clever
It’s true that the clips are only short, but it still seems bizarre to advertise yourself on a rival service, with clips of Family Guy, Saturday Night Live, and The Office all appearing on the channel.
It may be bizarre, but it looks like it’s also a clever move. The channel was the 68th most-viewed channel on the whole of YouTube in April, with 4 million page views.
If only a small minority of those 4 million then click over to Hulu to watch a full episode of the show they’ve just seen a clip of, then Hulu gains a lot more than they’ve lost.
