Longtime YouTube hater Mark Cuban, writing two days before the video site’s new Screening Room launch was announced, predicted that fast-growing Hulu will eventually put YouTube out of business. “The Youtube business model is broken and there is no light at the end of the tunnel as they are currently constructed,” he blogged. Because Hulu has the right to put ads on every clip and not, like YouTube, not just those produced by “partners”, “the more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic Youtube generates, the more money it loses.” I’ll be interested to see how he responds to Screening Room; if skeptical, he’d hardly be alone. Some links:

• “In all the coverage in the blogosphere, no one has mentioned that this is the exact same thing AtomFilms did for 10 years, and it didn’t work for them,” writes Chris Albrecht, a former Atom employee, at NewTeeVee. And why didn’t it work? “YouTube has a much more massive scale than Atom could have ever dreamed of, but that doesn’t change the fundamental situation. People prefer farts being lit on fire to artsy short films.”
• Another potential issue: much of the content that will be screening in the Room has been seen elsewhere. Two of the four films available at launch were pulled from the first issue of Wholphin, and according to the Wholphin blog, “Another dozen Wholphin films have been selected to appear in the Screening Room throughout the year.” Also of note: the Miguel Arteta/Miranda July short Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody?, a Wholphin title which was pitched in YouTube’s press release about the Room, has been on YouTube for almost two years.
• Scott Kirsner has some suggestions for how filmmakers can make the most out of their Screening Room deals, recommending that they “post in the YouTube comments area, so YouTube users feel you are a real, accessible human being — not some remote big-shot director!”
• Maybe Cuban can’t see the light at the end of YouTube’s tunnel, but Silicon Alley Insider can. “Google famously hasn’t figured out how to sell ads in the video stream itself, though it keeps promising that it will. Doesn’t matter…their most lucrative opportunities, so far, haven’t been in the videos themselves but on the real estate surrounding it.”