youtube is a central part of many of our lives, sad as that may be. it's incredibly easy to squander away hours looking at ridiculous videos of dogs singing and hamsters on pianos, and we rely heavily (though certainly not legally) on it for episodes of our favorite tv shows.
youtube has taken off rapidly; it started in 2005, with the first uploaded video being "me at the zoo" uploaded by the site's founder, jawed karim.
the site has created these online celebrities and the phenomenon of "viral videos" because they spread like a virus. but with success comes competition, and this has come primarily in the form of hulu.
hulu is a commercially-supported video hosting site that posts videos from networks like nbc and fox. the advantage to hulu is that the videos are of much higher quality and can be expanded without losing an picture quality. the major downside is the lack of options as far as which shows are provided.
i don't think that hulu will really pose any serious threat to youtube. youtube will always be the epitome of stupid video humor (with collegehumor coming in second), and it will always feature copyrighted shows it's not supposed to, because it's so difficult to monitor what gets uploaded.
in short, the end of youtube is not near. but it will be interesting to see where it will go from this point.
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