Soon, YouTube will be carrying ad-supported TV shows from CBS, clips from LionsGate movies with pre-rolls and post-rolls, full-length movies from MGM and exclusive content from one of the world’s leading reality-show producers. Not bad for a site that started with video clips of funny cats and skateboard pratfalls, and is still considered by some to be a kind of trailer-park ghetto of video (yes, Mark Cuban, we’re looking at you). With Hulu.com adding plenty of mainstream content too, the competition in online video definitely seems to be heating up.

In what has to be a bandwidth cost-related move, Revision3 is also stopping distribution of two shows, including social-media guru Gary Vaynerchuk’s popular Wine Library. In a blog post about the moves, CEO Jim Louderback says that PopSiren and Internet Superstar “had great promise, but never really found their audience.” The company is also stopping production of a long-running show called Pixel Perfect, which was apparently an instructional program about using Photoshop. Some of the shutdowns have predictably had spinoff effects, as Liz Gannes describes at NewTeeVee.

Despite the layoffs, Louderback says the company still has high hopes for the shows it has launched through its startup effort, Revision3 Beta — a kind of farm-team approach to developing new talent and new shows — which got underway with seven shows last month.

Explaining why he prefers print over the Web, he cites a scene from the movie “Back to School,” when Rodney Dangerfield asks his son why he’s buying used books. “And he says, ‘Because they’re already underlined, see?’ And Rodney says, ‘But that guy could have been a maniac.’ And that’s the problem with the Internet.”

Instead of relying on Web sources, Chodikoff watches C-SPAN, reads the transcripts from White House press conferences and briefings, calls the Joint Committee on Taxation when he has a question and otherwise engages in hard-nosed, reporterly research. He just happens to do it in the service of humour rather than outright journalism — which is a good thing, given how large a proportion of TV viewers say they rely on The Daily Show for their news. The Washington Post had a profile of Chodikoff earlier this year.

Apparently the audience that Tina Fey’s impersonation of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been drawing has caused more than a few jaws to drop at NBC. According to MediaPost, clips of Fey doing her thing have pulled in twice as many viewers as watched the originals on NBC, which according to a comment from TVbythenumbers at Silicon Alley Insider is almost unheard of. Obviously, those numbers are getting a boost from the election and the heightened awareness of the topic, but there’s also a feedback loop effect that SNL is benefiting from.

What if you could watch rehearsals for some of those SNL skits online — maybe through a special-access “backstage” pass for a small fee — and then see the finished product that same night? The show could even allow viewers to vote on the sketches they like (which could either lead to fewer stinkers or create more of them), or come up with other interactive features. Regardless, the ability to see more of the performers they like and the skits they want to watch would only deepen the relationship that fans have with the show, and would do so much better than Hulu can.

Update:

As it turns out, the guy in charge of the SNL standalone site is none other than man-about-town Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz. Does that explain girlfriend (and Huffington Post blogger) Rachel Sklar’s SNL obsession, or are the two unrelated? Inquiring minds want to know.

That clip has been watched more than 3 million times on YouTube, which is a big plus for the network. Except that the video that’s getting all of the views wasn’t uploaded by CBS — or was it? As Michael Learmonth describes in a piece for Advertising Age, the clip was uploaded by a user named 1970oaktree, and doesn’t have any CBS pre-roll advertising or anything like that. It also wasn’t uploaded to the official CBS channel. But 1970oaktree has only been a member of YouTube for about a week, and the Letterman video is the only thing he or she has ever uploaded.

So why doesn’t CBS just take the video down? According to Learmonth, there are reports that the uploader is actually a CBS staffer. Is this the equivalent of a band leaking their own album on the Bit Torrent peer-to-peer network? Who knows. In any case, it seems the network has decided it’s better to have people watching the clip than not watching it, and that the publicity generated by it is worth it, regardless of the technicalities of copyright infringement. By now I would hope that CBS has figured out that when people want to watch video, they don’t suddenly think to themselves “Oh, that’s a CBS show; I guess I should go to the CBS website.”