This is an example of Google's poor aesthetic taste really hurting them. With Hulu, the bottom bar disappears entirely and you get true full-screen. With YouTube, no dice: you get a quite large bar taking up space at the bottom.
But that has nothing whatsoever to do with aesthetic.
I think YouTube is doing a good thing. I think that the more open video is, the better it is for people. My gripe lies entirely with the fact that YouTube is an extremely ugly site, and with video - unlike some things - there are very attractive sites to compare with. Vimeo and Hulu do it right, both the overall aesthetic and the vanishing bar in particular. YouTube makes it so that I would never be able to really use my computer like a television, whereas in Hulu I can get fairly high-resolution video of, say, Arrested Development, and watch it in an environment that's even slightly better than watching it on TV.
But perfectly hitting the advertiser's target market, and also still supporting a significant part of the internet.
Sadly, I think this localisation will continue to be a part of online TV, as otherwise it ends up costing the content provider high bandwidth fees for ads that are not reaching the expected audience.
That's why I think that for video sites, making deals with foreign providers will eventually prove to be the sensible thing to do. If Hulu finds a collaborator overseas, it would help them a lot. The problem is motivation on their part.
On a somewhat related side note, last night the wife and I wanted to watch some of the Tina Fey/SNL Palin spoofs and by default we headed to YouTube to search. After not finding much, we backed out and found NBC was streaming the full clips.
The point? It will take a while for big media to encroach on GooTube's dominance. With deals like this, it will make it even harder.
At least they didn't add "Yet" to the end of it like Hulu and other video sites. That just winds me up, because you know they likely don't have any plans to roll out internationally.
If YouTube can make money out of me when I'm watching kids getting kicked in the balls, they should be able to do it on decent content. Until then — BitTorrent for me. :)
Where is that globalization when you need it. And yes I did try to replace watch?v= with v/ in the URL - it says "the video is no longer available". I guess I can profit by reminding myself that watching Startrek isn't the best thing I could be doing now.. although people claim its good.
