Super Bowl XLII is about to start on traditional television all across America, with people having friends and family over to watch the big game, and make an event of the whole thing.
Unfortunately, the only piece of the pie that the online video sites are grabbing a piece of are the adverts.
Both Hulu and YouTube have announced that they will be featuring the commercials extensively immediately after the Super Bowl finishes.
Hulu
The NBC and Fox owned Hulu is planning on posting all of the adverts from the game in high quality at www.hulu.com/superbowl within minutes of the game ending.
It will also be embedding several of the commercials on its blog at http://blog.hulu.com. But there’s not a sign of the game, or even any highlights of it anywhere to be seen on the site.
YouTube
YouTube announced last week that they will also be featuring every single one of the commercials in a YouTube gallery.
Users will then be able to watch the videos, choose their favourites, and share the ones they like with other people on the video sharing site.
The advert chosen as the best, by use of a drag and drop voting mechanism, will then be on the YouTube front page two days later on February 6th.
What About The Game?
The adverts in the breaks between Super Bowl action certainly seem to get more popular as each year goes by, but it’s still a strange and unfortunate decision to make that the only part of the event to get any sort of web coverage.
YouTube claim that less than half of the people who watched the game last year actually had an active interest in the game, the rest being much more focussed on the adverts, or just spending time with family and friends.
Conclusions
In that respect, both YouTube and Hulu have made a sensible decision to just concentrate on securing footage of the adverts, and ignoring the game completely.
The problem is, if video sharing sites, and particularly Hulu, want to legitimately become a viable alternative to broadcast television, they are going to have to start securing the actual big televisual events themselves, rather than the adverts which accompany them.
