RIVAL media big guns are lining up to challenge YouTube’s dominance of online video.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is planning a December launch of its Wikia search engine, which will offer an alternative to YouTube. A video service called Hulu is being put together by News Corp, ultimate owner of The Sunday Times, and NBC, General Electric’s televi-sion company. France’s Dailymotion is also making inroads into the market.

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, said the future would be “more collaborative”, with people coming together contributing footage and editing it together.

Hulu is expected to launch in trial form next month and feature licensed TV and film content from its founding partners and others. Hulu will distribute video on partner sites including AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo.

Dailymotion is gaining users in America, and had 26.8m unique visitors in July. Last week it raised $34m (£17m) in funding from London-based Advent Venture Partners and Paris-based AGF Private Equity.

But YouTube is still the leading player in online video. According to Comscore World Metrix, the audience measuring service, it had 194.9m unique users in July, up 200% on last year.

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