While I understand that technically speaking YouTube shows mostly short-form amateur videos and Hulu and other similar sites show long-form professional videos – mostly TV shows and movies, I am trying to determine how to briefly convey this distinction.
At TVissimo, the television and online video search engine I am involved with, we are not only indexing TV broadcast schedules but also online video sites such as TidalTV (Completed), Hulu (coming shortly) and others. When we say that we are offering a unified search capability for online videos and scheduled TV, people say – oh, you going to also show content from YouTube. Well, actually we are not planning to index YouTube, as it already has a good search function and content that is indexed differently from the videos we focus on.
We enable finding “topical” videos (TV shows and movies generally described in a “topical fashion”, namely a Seinfeld episode, a movie with Dustin Hoffman or a segment from the Olympics. We will offer access to similar content from other sites, namely movies and TV shows.
These videos are different from “scene” oriented videos of YouTube, where, among many other things, you can search for and find a video with scenes such as a “cat chasing a mechanical mouse”. These scenes may actually be segments of TV shows or movies, but the focus is on the individual scene, as opposed to the entire episode or program. Of course, YouTube has many other functions but showing whole segments of TV programs is not one.
So what do you think? I would greatly appreciate suggestions. YouTube is a social medium and TV and Hulu are not social media. This is certainly one difference. Now I also asked this question on my Twitter feed so I will be interested to see which media, blogs (my Portals and KM blog and the TVissimo blog) or Twitter (my Twitter feed and the Tvissimo one) gets the most, if any, response
