YouTube Going Corporate

This story was just posted on the Bulldog Reporter:

YouTube Absorbed By Corporate Machinery:
The Amateur-Video Pioneer Begins Transition to Hollywood Vehicle

YouTube will soon unveil a redesign that clearly separates its premium and long-form programming from the user-posted videos that account for most of its activity. According to two sources familiar with Google's plans for YouTube, the new design will do away with the current navigation scheme — which funnels users into "videos," "channels," and "community" categories. That layout will be replaced with a tabbed navigation with clearly defined sections for professional content, ClickZ reports.

The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google's network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising. Meanwhile the Videos channel will house amateur and semi-pro content of the sort major brand advertisers have shied away from. "They're putting up walls between all the UGC stuff, which will live within the video channel,...and the brand safe content," said one senior agency exec who was briefed on YouTube's plans, reports ClickZ writer Zachary Rodgers.

The redesign also touches YouTube's video player. The new player interface closely resembles the video experience on Hulu, the video portal that's grown by leaps and bounds since its launch last year. Like Hulu, the new video player displays visual markers in places where ads are scheduled to play. Also like Hulu, the YouTube player allows users to "dim the lights," reducing the brightness of screen real estate outside the video frame. "It's totally a Hulu approach, but that's best practices right now," the exec told ClickZ.

The planned launch date for the overhauled site is April 16. According to sources, the original plan was to roll it out next week, but YouTube pushed the date back for unknown reasons. YouTube has been pitching launch packages to agencies for approximately six weeks.

This does not bode well. Myspace was once a vibrant, booming social media platform. Then Newscorp decided it would be a great outlet to reach young people and bought it, quickly turning the site into one giant flashing banner advertisement for its latest movies and promotions. People fled the site in droves to Facebook, which was still an emerging site growing in popularity amongst high school and college kids. I fear the same will happen with YouTube once Hollywood sinks its incredibly out-of-touch teeth in.