Once foes, NBC hooks up with YouTube
Mekeisha Madden Toby
Detroit News
Friday, June 30, 2006
In high school, it was always weird to see two girls who had hated each other suddenly become friends.
Well, pull out the zit cream, because NBC and independent Internet video portal YouTube (youtube.com) are those catty girls from your teens, and now they love each other to a sickening degree.
Back in the winter, NBC was all up in YouTube’s face, taking the-little-Web-site-that-could to task for offering downloads of the "Saturday Night Live" short, "Lazy Sunday" for free. The peacock people even went as far as issuing cease-and-desist threats.
So imagine everyone’s surprise when NBC announced this week that it will be partnering with YouTube, a site known for showing hilariously remixed movie trailers, strange clips and homemade flicks.
NBC is getting its own channel on YouTube, but for now, is using it to preview promos for its 2006-07 TV season. In July, NBC is creating episodes of its hit comedy "The Office" for NBC.com . An added bonus feature will allow Web crawlers to create their own "Office" episodes, with a YouTube tie-in.
"The audience NBC is trying to attract is not interested in promotional videos. They’re already putting the wrong things up there," says David Cherry, Director of Production & Multimedia for ID Society, a leading interactive marketing agency out of New York City.
Cherry says NBC wised up and realized that YouTube could give them the Gen X male viewers it desired. That includes the 5 million YouTube users who downloaded "Lazy Sunday."
"Sure there are some funny shorts and films on YouTube, but the best material is from the movies real people make, like that short that one kid did about his MySpace page," he says. "If NBC does this ‘Office’ thing right, it will attract a lot of young people, especially young guys, who want to make movies to share with their friends."