With all the recent talk about bringing Internet video to the living room, a little nugget of an idea about a YouTube TV channel got me thinking that a better idea would be The YouTube Show — say, a half-hour program every now and then compiling the best that user-generated video has to offer.
Or the worst. Doesn’t matter. A YouTube Show could go a long way in providing something to ease the worries of the major networks and studios, who just don’t know whether to love or hate Google’s $1.65 billion baby. Something along the lines of Veoh Viral or VH1’s Web Junk, or the stuff Current TV does.
In an era where cheap, reality-based programming is clearly favored by large viewing audiences, isn’t The YouTube Show a guaranteed hit? Take a network who’s ready to sue you and dump in their laps a 30-minute piece of programming to help sell light beer, big trucks, or those drugs that help you throw a football through a swinging tire.
YouTube wins by keeping the lawyers off their backs, and slam-dunks itself as the place to be for UGC. The winning network gets to wrap itself in a cozy ersatz Web 2.0 blanket. It’s so easy, you wonder why we haven’t seen Amanda Congdon hosting it yet.
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