YouTube, MGM tie up for full length content

New York, November 10: In a bid to enhance advertising income and retain its number one slot, YouTube, the largest video-sharing website, has made an agreement with MGM to show some full-length television shows and films. Till date, YouTube videos were largely small clips of ten minutes or so.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) founded in 1924 deals in the production and distribution of films and television programs. With the advent of television, the dominance of MGM in the entertainment industry faded. As on date, the 84 year old studio is in a financial mess.

To begin with, episodes of "American Gladiators", films like "Bulletproof Monk", "The Magnificent Seven" and clips from movies like "Legally Blonde" can be watched at YouTube free of cost. As a part of the agreement, ads will run along with the video.

YouTube, formed in February 2005 is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. An estimated 81 million people visited the site in September 2008, which is an indicator of its popularity.

Jordan Hoffner, the director of content partnerships for YouTube said, "We believe in comprehensiveness, and we want to have deals with everybody. We want to be able to give users the most content possible."

Off late YouTube has revamped itself and has added hoards of features like "Video Id", "theater view" etc. This partnership with MGM should enable YouTube to ward off a potential threat from its rival Hulu.

James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said, "YouTube is essentially saying to media companies, ‘We are sorry for our past copyright stance; we weren’t thinking big enough. Let’s see how we can make some money together'."

Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox has been giving YouTube a run for its money by siphoning off advertising revenues towards itself. Hulu had 6.3 million visitors in September 2008