NBC and News Corporation have taken their joint venture video site Hulu into beta just days after NBC withdrew all its promotional material from YouTube.

The free, ad-supported site will carry both entire programmes and shorter show clips from NBC, Fox, Comcast, Sony Pictures TV and MGM. Some social features, such as sharing clips and embedding functionality, will be offered but the site will not offer any user-generated content or upload facilities.

"This is all about premium content," explained Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. "We wanted to make it as easy as possible to watch the stuff... and make sure that the content could run free."