AOL UnCut to challenge YouTube

Yet another case of a big internet company picking up an idea from a smaller startup. Google has been doing this since a long time with their services and now AOL is coming out with their YouTube killer named AOL UnCut.

YouTube has become hugely popular in the recent months due to the simplicity it provides to upload videos on the internet. However, they have found it hard to make profits from the service. Perhaps, they are looking for a possible acquisition deal.

AOL instead decided to launch a similar service and it is currently running in open beta. They are currently allowing videos less than 5 minutes in length to be uploaded to their servers. They are then converted to flash video file in a similar fashion to YouTube.

AOL also provides a similar method to the visitors to embed the video on their own sites and blogs. The company describes their service as:

UnCut Video is the place to come for videos on the Web. Upload videos from your web camera or camcorder. Watch videos from your home state, from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Middle East. Share videos with your friends over AIM and email. News, sports, pets, music, personals, short films, autos, the odd and the absurd — it’s all here. See it! Shoot it! Share it! Rate and comment on videos, and add them to your AOL Journal.

It would be interesting to see if they can snatch away users from YouTube. In a similar way, it would be similar to see if Google Notebook can lure the users away from similar services like del.icio.us.