YouTube said this week it might implement micropayments or paid subscriptions for some premium content, basically Hollywood studios episodes and movies.

YouTube is struggling to profit from its digital popularity. (Now two-thirds of all video views in the United States occur on YouTube; it has monthly 90 million visitors, 10 times as many as the next biggest site).

Credit Suisse has estimated that the video site will lose $470 million in 2009, due to the hight cost of bandwidth and storage to stream more than 5 billion clips a month.

Also, with more professionally produced video, YouTube expects to attract more advertising. Doing so, the company will be competing directly with Hulu –which features NBC and Fox TV shows- and other Websites that server up full-length TV shows and movies free (with advertisement), like ABC.com, TV.com, and Fancast.

For now, YouTube’s new Premium show site is free.


Creating a music star in real time

The phenomenon of the 47-year-old karaoke enthusiast Susan Boyle, 23 million video views on YouTube, who performed I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables on Britain’s Got Talent last weekend, has shown the power of the global community created by online video. A star was born in real time.