NHL Signs a Deal With Youtube

colbertlow,

on November 22, 2006,

National Hockey League (NHL) has recently signed a deal with YouTube in an attempt to get more young prospective viewers. Among the things that have been laid out for syndication are daily highlight videos from regular season games and other NHL-produced footage. Or perhaps some mini videos of hockey fights too. For Canadians, NHL is their national sport and is their pride. This is mostly due to the influence this sport has in their outdoor life. Through this deal, YouTube and the NHL later added that they would share revenue generated from ads placed next to the league’s clips.

There is a designated url specifically for you to keep up-to-date with NHL highlights at http://www.youtube.com/nhl. Youtube will work closely with NHL to make sure that users will respect their copyright policy without uploading their own content to Youtube. With viewership of more than 100 million times a day, Youtube is seen as a great way to share and distribute video contents online for viral growth of a social based website, and to gain global influence for those who weren’t able to watch NHL in their place.

Previously, last month, CBS made a deal with Youtube and it proves to be a success to their TV network. The Letterman show gained 5 percent (or 200,000 new viewers) boost to their viewership, while The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson increased 7 percent (or 100,000 viewers) since the CBS YouTube channel debuted a month ago. They even have 22,000 Youtubers who subscribed to receive video updates from them.

I wonder if it’s a new Web 2.0 TV model being created? And of course with the conditions YouTube can offer its partners will we finally see the situation when smaller players will soon only be able to place some home-made content while Google will be working to monopolize video sharing market same as what we are seeing in search technologies? Do you think it will finally happen?