YouTube has just announced that it will now offer full-length, current episodes of a suite of World Wrestling Entertainment-related programming. The deal includes episodes of Friday Night Smackdown, WWE NXT, WWE Superstars, and ECW. I don’t know what any of those are, but I assume they all involve tights, big hair, and burly guys fighting. You can find all of it on the WWE’s official channel.
This sort of content may not pique the interest of a huge number of TechCrunch readers (I can honestly say I’ve never watched a WWE event in my life) but the deal is significant: this is the one of the first times YouTube has offered so-called “catch-up” primetime programming. Since it began serving full-length episodes last year, YouTube has primarily offered content that was old (in some cases, really old), and it hasn’t been a place people would look to catch an episode of a show they missed the week before. In contrast, recent content has been Hulu’s bread-and-butter, as users log on to catch the episodes they’ve missed. YouTube obviously has a long way to go, but expect to hear about more deals in the near future — I doubt they would have called out the fact that they’re growing their library of catch-up content if it wasn’t the start of a new trend.
YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. YouTube is the leader in online video, sharing original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email. Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky...
Sponsored Ads
Sponsored Ads
Sponsored Ads
