YouTube Live to Straddle the Pro-Am Content Divide

Seeing yesterday on YouTube that the Google-owned video site plans a YouTube Live event on Saturday night left me with a feeling of deja vu. Or at least the thought that I thought YouTube had done this before.

In fact, it hasn’t. And so, should you care to tune in (log in?) at 8 p.m. EST, for the first time you’ll see a host of YouTube luminaries, including musical stars Akon and Joe Satriani, and, oh, those other kind of YouTube stars: like Fred Figglehorn (above), who “has anger management issues” and apparently needs a lot of helium to keep his schtick going. Yes, YouTube Live will delve into that other kind of celebrity — the kind that, had this been the 1970s, might have appeared on “The Gong Show.”

I don’t know if I’ll check in, at least at the appointed hour; I’d far prefer to catch up on professional programming that’s stacking up in the DVR queue. Nonetheless, YouTube Live strikes me as an intriguing experiment, an attempt to marry professional entertainers such as Akon with the non-professional. Combined, they make the blanket statement that the line between the two doesn’t matter much anymore.

That said, I suspect that YouTube Live and its line-blurring exercise is also largely a response to Hulu, the video streaming joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. By some accounts, Hulu is beginning to nibble at YouTube’s lunch. If YouTube has been primarily about making it possible for any yahoo (forgive Internet pun!) to upload video, Hulu — though no audience threat to YouTube yet — is quickly gaining traction as the go-to place for what it calls “premium video content.” Fred Figglehorn need not apply.

In more evidence of YouTube’s creeping shift toward accepting more long-form professional content, the site partnered with MGM last week and will post full-length movies. Welcome to the streaming video wars.