Remember the television commercials of Polaroid cameras and Timex watches? Well, Hewlett-Packard is going to revive these old TV commercials by migrating them to new media. HP is making a tie-up with YouTube for a live show called Branded Entertainment that will be aired on YouTube’s home page from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time on Friday. The main purpose behind this show is to showcase the latest technology of HP, named as “H.P. ePrint Live“.  This technology enables to print their photographs from mobile by sending them to web-connected H.P. printers and using a unique Email address.

This show will revive the old commercials of Polaroid cameras and Time. For the purpose, both companies hired some popular TV faces including Steve Allen, Perry Como, Jack Paar and John Cameron Swayze. Besides, H.P. is also approaching to rope up comedian Rob Riggle and members of the improvisational comedy troupe called Upright Citizens Brigade for the program.

The program has been created by three agencies of Omnicom Group namely Porter Novelli, Proximity and Omnicom Media Group. Best Buy is the retail partner and is using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to encourage customer participation.

“We had a conversation around” putting the show on TV, said Tariq Hassan, vice president for worldwide marketing and communication at H.P., who is based in New York. But the company decided that outlets like YouTube were “more relevant to the target” for the technology, he said. The program represents a different approach “to our media buy, done in a collaborative way, with Google and YouTube,” he added, compared with “a traditional search buy” — that is, buying key words like “printer” on search engines.

Telling more of the ePrint initiative, Suzie Reider, director of display advertising in North America for YouTube and the Google display network said,

“When you launch a product, it’s hard to communicate in a banner ad what does it do. When the ideas come flying into the printer onstage, consumers will see it and immediately say, ‘Oh my gosh, you can e-mail from anywhere and see it print.’ Branded entertainment doesn’t work well when it feels awkward,” Ms. Reider said, “when it’s hard to make a connection between the sponsor and the content.”

In this instance, “it’s logical for H.P. to sponsor the live stream, because the product is on stage and the ideas for the comedians are coming in through the product.”

HP is promoting ePrint in several other ways such as it is giving printers to stars of reality TV series so that they share their experiences on social networks.

Besides this program, HP is making several other announcements. For example, it is LeBron James’ new web show entitles “The LeBrons“, whose motive is to help support boys and girls of Clubs of America. This show will again be live on YouTube and will be promoted through LeBron’s social networks and website.

Hewlett Packard is making several developments this year, along with some solid plans for the organization in terms of marketing around new and existing products, clearly looking to online video and TV as a viable platform.  YouTube, which signed a Hollywood deal last week, is looking to become an important method of distribution for online TV, and advertising around these efforts will be a necessary part of Google’s long term goals.

For HP as a company overall, it is planning to invest more in its software, networking and storage businesses. It’s quite clear that HP is looking for some interesting ways to market some of these products, through sponsorships and partnerships in the online TV sector.