YouTube Launching Long-Form Video

Michael Learmonth at AlleyInsider has the scoop about YouTube adding long-form video to their site. Apparently the company has decided that 10-minute videos were simply not enough among increasing competition from sites like Hulu which are providing entire episodes of television shows. Here’s what Michael Learmonth had to say:

YouTube’s 10-minute limit has served a couple of purposes to date: It keeps bandwidth costs down, and it makes it harder for copyright owners to complain about unauthorized streams: Technically, you could cut up “300″ into 10-minute chunks and distribute it through the site (and we assume some people have). But who wants to watch that? And short clips also work for YouTube because, well, it’s the Web, and there’s a limited appetite for anything that lingers on for more than a couple of minutes.

So what’s Google thinking about here? One obvious answer: Advertising. YouTube sells ads against videos uploaded by its content partners, but there are only so many ads you can sell against a short, under clip. Presumably YouTube wants to figure out if it can sell more of them against longer clips.