Last week on a panel discussion in New York, ABC’s Albert Cheng described how his network was syndicating its content on YouTube - to paraphrase Mr. Cheng, “we supply them with meta data for our shows, but the actual ABC streams themselves still originate from our servers at ABC.”

ABC content on YouTube?  This caught my attention, because I was under the impression that ABC was pretty wary of syndicating their content, preferring instead to remain within its in-house web video site.  While the other majors have proprietary sites as well, CBS also maintains a healthy Channel Partner relationship with YouTube (at last count, sharing almost 17,000 videos) - and the majority of NBC and Fox streams are delivered from their jointly-owned web video service Hulu - which in turns syndicates to other sites such as AOL, MySpace, and MSN (and even allows users to freely embed streams à la YouTube).

ABC, though, kept pretty much to themselves - so the next day I decided to look into their partenrship with Youtube.  Sure enough, there is in fact an ABC YouTube Channel, although it’s a something of a Potemkin Village - only select content from one ABC program (the Jimmy Kimmel late-night talk show) is actually available.  Even more curious, the ABC channel is not visible on the Channel lists, and if you search on ‘ABC’ from within YouTube, it’s mysteriously missing from the search results (in other words, you have to know to type www.youtube.com/abc explicitly to get there).

Nevertheless, I took this as a sign things were changing a bit at both YouTube and ABC:

• The external hosting arrangement described by Mr. Cheng indicated to me that in some situations involving premium and/or licensed content, YouTube was now willing to serve as merely a content aggregator rather than content host.
• I took ABC’s presence on YouTube (albeit very limited) as a sign the network was at least willing to stick its corporate toe into the syndication market.

All in all, I thought it was an interesting story - interesting enough to write a typically captivating post last week on the emergence of syndication and aggregation as two separate, distinct, and somewhat independent internet video business models.  However, it now seems ABC might be ready to do more than just stick a toe in the syndication waters: according to paidcontent.org, the network is in talks to get onboard with Fox, NBCU, and Hulu venture - and not just to syndicate content, but to buy an equity stake!

It could be that the almost empty YouTube ABC Channel I found was a merely a proof of concept - a limited experiment in syndication before  ABC entered into more serious negotiations with Hulu.

Here’s an thought: if and when this ABC/Hulu deal does go through, let’s try going to www.youtube.com/abc the next day - l wonder how quickly www.youtube.com/abc is taken down.