The YouTube phenomenon is certainly making for some interesting business arrangements. It seems like every "old guard" media company is either striking deals with YT to make sure their content is legally shown on the service. But now that Google is in the picture, it seems like companies are banding together to fight the online behemoth and create their own product. Some companies have done both.

Take NBC, for example. Last year they struck a deal with YT to create a channel for them to place legal clips of their shows on the service. But now, they've decided to join forces with News Corp., the owner of the FOX network, to create an online video site to show TV shows and movies from both companies. The networks will leverage their content partnership deals with Yahoo, MySpace (owned by News Corp.) and our corporate benefactors at AOL to distribute and link to the videos. This LA Times article goes into the details.

According to this Washington Post article, our corporate benefactors over at AOL have decided to retool their video site to put more emphasis on user-uploaded videos. Of course, they're doing this in an effort to capture a piece of the massive success experienced by YouTube and Google Video over the last year or so. The new video site is set to launch on Friday, and will have a seach function similar to that of the other sites; there will also be 45 on-demand video channels, including exclusive programming from cable channels like Comedy Central, the History Channel, and Nickelodeon. According to TV Week, the site will also have an iTunes-style paid video download component.

I wonder how many people are actually going to upload videos to the AOL site. AOL has a huge built-in audience, but many of them still use dial-up, which will make it hard for them to download videos. So that means our corporate parents are going to have to market this to non-customers somehow, which will be tough. I admire that their trying to modernize their content, but it makes me wonder if they're just reacting to a trend rather than blazing their own trail.

[via Lost Remote and Bloglines]