• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 23, 2007

In an effort to boost demand for Hulu, its new joint Web TV venture with News Corp., NBC has removed its content from YouTube.

NBC, which informed YouTube of its decision late last week, clearly hopes that it can control the distribution of clips from shows like "Saturday Night Live" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," which have appeared on YouTube with NBC's blessing for more than one year.

The marks the latest wrinkle in a relationship that has had several ups and downs since YouTube launched. When the "Saturday Night Live" skit "Lazy Sunday" appeared on the video-sharing site in late 2005, the clip helped catapult the site to national prominence and also became a viral sensation. But the clip drew the wrath of NBC executives, who insisted that they wanted to stream it from their own site and, in February 2006, demanded that YouTube remove it.

Eventually, however, NBC not only settled its differences with YouTube, but forged a promotional agreement with the site, using it as a direct channel to viewers. For instance, NBC last year held a contest on YouTube in which it asked viewers to create their own ads for "The Office."

But with the current move to pull content from the site, it again appears that NBC aims to control where people watch its clips. Of course, NBC is hardly alone in wanting to limit where its clips appear online. The decision to take down content from YouTube comes within one week of Viacom's announcement that it had launched a Web destination for all clips from "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

Still, in this era of declining ratings, and the dwindling influence of TV, one would think that the networks would want to offer clips as widely as possible in hopes of building an audience.