Facing increasing competition from companies like Hulu, YouTube has been working hard over the last year to forge partnerships with commercial content providers to bring full-length TV shows and movies to its users.

Tonight at 9pm ET, YouTube will be holding a viewing party for the film “Taxi Driver” in the YouTube Screening Room. What makes this viewing party different? Live Twitter updates will be integrated directly into it.

YouTube has tested Twitter integration with other videos, but this is the first time that Twitter updates will actually be looped into a full-length film. Tweets will be displayed underneath the video player, just above video responses. YouTube is doing this in conjunction with Sony’s Crackle.com YouTube Channel. All updates containing “youtube” “crackledotcom” or the hashtags “#taxidriver” or “#yttaxidriver” will be displayed.

Other companies have taken on the idea of creating virtual viewing parties (see Hulu’s Facebook app) or integrating tweets with video content but this is a pretty new way to integrate tweeting directly with online video from a commercial content provider.

Source:http://mashable.com/2009/10/16/youtube-taxi-driver-twitter/