Video sites: Diminishing distinctions

YouTube.com's more about user-generated video and Hulu.com about TV-pro-generated video. That's the current characterization of the two, but it's clumsy and it's changing. As USATODAY points out about the fast-growing Hulu (from 107 million streams in August to 150 million in September, it cites Nielsen figures as showing) gets that it needs to be about pretty much whatever its users want it to be. So even though it doesn't have revenue-sharing deals with ABC and CBS, Hulu links to their shows anyway, gaining nothing in the process but the flexibility and multiple options users seek on the user-driven Web. It also has a channel on video-sharing giant YouTube (at 5.3 billion streams in September). Users can watch whole TV shows on Hulu. In fact YouTube "gets it" too, because it just scrapped its 10-min. cap on the length of videos people can upload to the site. "YouTube also has been making a push to premium content, with full shows from CBS and full-length independent movies," USATODAY adds.