So Hulu is commissioning original scripted content (Battleground is first up), and Netflix did the same when it needed to salvage its reputation. Yesterday Ken Doctor on NiemanLabs said everybody needs signature content: In a world where attention is scattered like shrapnel, celebrity is the only endorsement that works. But doesn’t YouTube have a bigger jewel pretty much locked down, in the area of social entertainment?

Originality.

Yesterday I wrote very briefly about Toby Tobuscus Turner, whose “I eat breakfast for breakfast” still has me smirking. Within hours of the article being posted here on Forbes.com, Turner had a skit up about it on his daily videoblog. Entertainment at the speed of news.

Turner has 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube with 122 million upload views. UPDATE: The figure is perhaps as high as 800 million. My 13 year old son calls him a legend.

Or another YouTube act that tickled me. Ask a Mortician (Die some day. Live Forever).

Or take a look at the awesomely talented Destorm Power, whose videos are a continuous interaction with his audience.

Or Young Turks (642 million views). This is where my children get their political news and attitude. Huffington Post has signed up Cenk Uygur, the front man- which is very smart. While Arianna Huffington might want to do a CNN, she knows enough to do buy-in teen and twenties attitude too. Young Turks sounds like improv but the viewpoints are astute and they connect through people with admirable lashings of insight.

Here’s Young Turks interviewing “Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, The Nightwatchmen and Audioslave, about his high hopes for President Obama — they’re both half-Kenyan, have Illinois roots, went to Harvard, were on the cover of “Rolling Stone”

“I admit that I was swept up in some of the euphoria around the [2008] election, in part because I never imagined there would be an African-American president,” Morello says. “That blinded me to the fact that it was a Democratic president more than it was some sort of Camelot knight waving a progressive magic wand to right all of our wrongs. I’m a firm believer in street politics, not congressional and presidential politics.”

The Turks have mainstream credentials prior to starting up their online show but it is online that they connected with a young, informed demographic who seem to trust online more than on TV.

The key to understanding the YouTube entertainment lies in the expansion of opportunity.

The YouTube elite’s MO is to respond immediately to their audience. It’s interactive and fast turnaround. And low cost. It is do-able accessible.

Kids look at it and think: I could do that. I can do a three minute sketch.

And they look back on the all time comedy greats like Monty Python and see something similar. Anyone can do a silly walk.

This week Rupert Murdoch‘s Sky TV began running a retrospective of Python – all five survivors are interviewed. Eric Idle talks about the horrendous sense of imprisonment in his childhood in a boarding school in the English midlands and then the escape and rebellion of comedy in the 1960s and 1970s.

That desire to escape while screaming seems to echo strongly today – my kids watch Turner and the Turks and they watch Python. Python is a YouTube and a cable perennial. It is made for the web, just forty years too early.

But it was also a direct consequence of expanded opportunity.

The satire boom that led to Monty Python began off the back of a new BBC channel, BBC 2, in the early 1960s. With the introduction of BBC 2 British entertainment expanded channel capacity by 50% overnight.

Just like now, talent filled that opportunity instantaneously. And the patients were let in, the fringe, the loose cannons, the unstructured and raw.

At the F.ounders conference in October 2011, Reed Hastings announced that the future of Netflix was mobile and global. But if Netflix really wanted to connect with a global audience via mobile wouldn’t he be better with a YouTube style of production?

Television tends to work in generations, locking opportunity away for years after short periods of expansion. That’s the historical nature of a talent driven business.

But look at what has changed. This is now an every person medium, making airtime available to anyone with a hint of originality and a capacity to work an audience. Hulu and Netflix need to take that into account.

There is no shortage of talent to make it work.