YouTube Viewers Now Get Full-Length CBS Television Shows

Mountain View, California-based Internet giant Google has seen its YouTube property enter into a partnership with CBS Corp that has given users of the most popular video sharing Web site access to an archive of full-length television programming surrounded by advertisements. The partnership between YouTube and CBS was announced Friday, with CBS making streams of the archived full-length TV programs available to the video site's audience, which numbered more than 330 million in August according to Web traffic measurement company comScore.

Among the new YouTube content from CBS were entire episodes of the shows "Young and the Restless," "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Star Trek." Aside from a relatively small number of videos from test initiatives such as a "Screening Room" effort launched in June, YouTube has in the past limited its Web video programming to a 10 minute limit.

"You may see in-stream video ads (including pre-, mid- and post-rolls) embedded in some of these episodes; this advertising format will only appear on premium content where you are most comfortable seeing such ads," YouTube said in the Friday announcement.

Details of the revenue sharing agreement between CBS and YouTube were not disclosed. The ability to generate revenue through advertising has long been a goal at Google, which purchased YouTube, the world's largest video sharing Web site, for $1.65 billion in stock compensation in 2006.

- SearchEngineWorld.com