Oprah Winfrey Discovers YouTube
Posted on November 5, 2007
Oprah Winfrey has launched a YouTube channel. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Oprah will have YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen on her show. YouTube stars like Judson Laipply will also appear on the The Oprah Winfrey Show.
She's dominated TV talk for decades. Her recommendations send shockwaves through the publishing industry, She's even conquered Broadway. And now, Oprah is set to go viral.One downside to Oprah's channel is that embedding has been disabled on the videos. It's smart launching a YouTube channel but not allowing any of the videos to be embedded seems like an odd tactic if you are trying to go viral. If you have video clips and you want them to be broadly distributed the smartest thing to do is to utilize the power of the blogosphere and let bloggers embed the clips. By disabling embedding these videos will not be nearly as popular as they could have been. Oprah also has an unembeddable welcome message to her YouTube channel that can be found here.Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Prods. has announced a partnership with YouTube to launch a new Oprah channel on the video site. The new channel, which went live Friday, features a collection of supplemental video from "The Oprah Winfrey Show," including backstage footage, highlights from guests' appearances, and even videos that Oprah has shot herself.
To help kick off interest in the new partnership, Oprah has booked YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen to appear on her show Tuesday. Oprah will also feature several YouTube-discovered stars on the program, including Tyson the skateboarding dog and Judson Laipply, the creator the much-streamed Evolution of Dance clip.