Facebook Leaving Developers to Media Distribution Deals?

Last night Josh Elman posted on the Facebook blog about the rise in applications that are embedding videos provided by the television networks. Watercooler’s TVLoop applications use Hulu to display videos of show episodes and Mesmo TV is displaying the shows as well. Both have had mixed results and Mesmo TV has dropped from over 681,000 monthly active users to around 472,000 as displayed in the chart below.

What’s interesting is Facebook’s current strategy to leave distribution deals to their developers.