The prospect of YouTube continuing it’s dominance in online video has big media companies scrambling to create strategic alliances with friends and foe alike, to challenge YouTube’s supremacy in the online video space.

Just this week, it was announced (Listen to CNET News PodCast on PodZinger) NBC Universal and News Corp. will band together to create a joint venture that will launch an online video destination to rival, and in their expectations, surpass YouTube in terms of reach and revenues. To help distribute all their video content to the online masses, the usual suspects (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, MySpace) have signed in hopes that the magic of “premium content” will rub off, and help prevent defection of their user base to sites like YouTube.

There’s no arguing NBC and News Corp have lots of video content to make any one, young or old, interested in killing time watching their content. The problem I see with their strategy is that they have chosen to partner with distribution partners (with the exception of MySpace) that are not necessarily in the user demographic both NBC and News Corp want to reach—the young, web-savvy, less than 30 years of age user. It’s important not to forget that Google spent $1.6 billion dollars to acquire YouTube for it’s vast video collection, but most importantly because of the prime demographic user base that flocks to the YouTube site. If the Google brand was getting stale among the under-30 crowd, the acquisition of YouTube allows Google to stay relevant with this user base via an attractive, Web 2.0 brand.

If staying relevant with dynamic online users means any thing to NBC and News Corp., I seriously think they should rethink their distribution strategy and focus instead partnering with online companies that will present them with a desired audience.