Yesterday was a big day for YouTube. The BBC, apparently taking a break from obsessively updating its MySpace profile, signed on to provide three new channels on YouTube: a BBC news channel in addition to two entertainment channels carrying hot stuff like David Tennant's Dr. Who Video Diary. The deal represents a needed win for the much-trafficked video site, which has had to rely on beauty snippets from the Ford Modeling Agency to make up for the sudden withdrawal of Jon Stewart clips when Viacom pulled the plug last month. As for Viacom, it's signed up with Joost, which seems to be emerging with Brightcove as the distribution partner of choice for Google-averse media outfits.
Meanwhile, YouTube's expanding partnership efforts do seem to beg the question of what user-generated content actually means. After all, a media company, be it Viacom or the BBC, is a user in the same sense that a corporation is a person, which is to say as a legal fiction. If this kind of thing keeps up, aren't they going to have to change the name to ThemTube?
