A new alternative to Google?s YouTube

News Corporation and NBC Universal to launch new video distribution service.

Google’s YouTube has become the major portal for publishing and searching for online video content. Google bought the site for one major reason: access to eyeballs. The number of visitors represent a huge audience for online advertising.

YouTube is mostly known for all the amateur videos available, but Google is also trying hard to get access to syndicated footage, TV series and such.

Now wonder other parties would like to get a piece of the pie. News Corporation and NBC Universal is to “launch the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled”. And the goal is to distribute TV programs and movies.

The content will be distributed via AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo!

It is unclear whether there also will be a separate site giving users access to all this free content. Probably not, as the main point seems to be to skip the site and brand building altogether:

“This is a game changer for Internet video,” said Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation. “We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want.”

Indeed, each partner will embed a player within their own site, making the offering organic to each destination.

The sites will distribute full episodes from TV shows like Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef, plus archive material for free. The revenue is to be generated thorugh ads. If the service also will contain paid content is not clear.

There will also be regular films available. The distribution format is now mentioned, so we guess we are talking about copy protected streaming here, not regular downloads.

Is this new service a real threat to Google’s YouTube? Actually, in the area of online TV and movie distribution it is. Not only does the company get immediate access to a large percentage of the US (and world) audience; this service does not have to struggle with all the copyright violations bothering Google either.

it seems the world has taken another step towards the merger of TV and online IP distribution.

Press release.