Introduction

In the last few years, video on the internet has become a legitimate way for people to share art (whether their own or others') with an audience. The most obvious example of this is YouTube, but there are other sites with similar objectives. The most widely recognized examples include Dailymotion, Vimeo and Google Video (which is sort of conjoined with YouTube now, since Google owns it). But on the next tier down from these catch-all services, there are specialty sites. These niche-based video services include sites like Super Deluxe, which focuses on original short comedy videos, and Hulu which focuses on legal full-length episodes of television. Hulu is a somewhat different example because the content is not user-generated, but there is a system set up where users can create clips out of the content on the site. I'll be focusing on YouTube because its become the template for all other sites, and is by far the most popular at this point (looking at Alexa.com's global rankings, it's currently the second most popular site on the internet following Yahoo.com).

Examples of niche-based internet video:

Super Deluxe


Hulu