I don’t watch much TV, whether from an actual television set or online. I also don’t frequently peruse YouTube videos; the only ones I watch are ones that are sent to me by friends. The one show I watch with some degree of regularity is the Colbert Report. So, my first thought with this assignment was to search for video of the recent “March to Keep Fear Alive” (you can’t even understand how sad I was that I couldn’t go!).
When I did a search for “March to Keep Fear Alive” on Hulu, all of the results on the first page were links to Comedy Central (the channel that airs The Colbert Report). No full episodes appeared in the search; instead segments of episodes relating to the March appeared. There was one link to The Daily Show, but the rest linked to the Colbert Report.
My identical search on YouTube yielded very different results. In contrast, not one result on the first page linked to Comedy Central’s website. In fact, none of the results on the first page were clips of the Colbert Report at all. Instead, my results on YouTube showed news reports and interviews with Stephen Colbert, as well as citizen journalism-esque documentaries from the March itself.
This difference is probably self-evident in that Hulu is commercially supported by networks while YouTube is user-generated. But this points to why a user would choose to use one over the other. If your goal is to watch official, professionally produced content, the obvious choice is Hulu. If you are interested in a wider variety of content, albeit less professional, YouTube would be the better choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment