Honeymoon’s Over

  YouTube is slowly beginning to lose its luster.  And if they don’t act now, the video-sharing site’s future may be at stake.  On Monday, Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, ordered that all Comedy Central content be pulled from the site.  Users attempting to view clips of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report and South Park were met with a simple message: “This video has been removed due to terms of use violations.” 

  Comedy Central’s content on YouTube has, since the site’s inception just over a year ago, been one of its largest draws, and its removal may set a new trend among the owners of copyrighted content posted by the site’s millions of users.  In the beginning, most companies saw YouTube as a helpful tool, a vehicle for free promotion.  “Getting it off the Internet is no different than getting it off TV,” Jon Stewart recently told an interviewer.  But when the site was recently sold to Google for $1.65 billion, I suspect that the suits at Viacom began to realize that someone was getting very, very rich off of their product.

  It all boils down to two factors: site traffic and advertising revenue.  No, scratch that.  It all boils down to one factor: Money.  YouTube users, according to the terms of use, are not allowed to post copyrighted video on the site, but with 20 million unique visitors per month and 65,000 videos being uploaded daily, it is impossible to police.  When copyright holders ask YouTube to remove the copyrighted material, YouTube must then contact the user who posted it and have the videos removed. 

  While, to the average YouTuber, it may seem like Viacom is raining on the parade, they are actually just trying to protect their product.  And, I suspect, the plug-pulling won’t stop with Comedy Central content.  The media giant also owns MTV, MTV2, BET, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, Paramount Pictures, Showtime and the Sundance Channel, to name a few. 

  With YouTube’s future at stake, and all eyes watching, this would be a good time for the bigwigs at Google/YouTube and Viacom to call a meeting to hammer out an agreement to share advertising revenue.  YouTube already has similar deals in place with most of the major music companies, including Universal Music Group, and several of the U.S. television networks, including NBC and CBS.

  There are two ways this can be done.  The first would allow users to post Viacom-owned content without restrictions, YouTube to continue to sell advertising on the site, and then break Viacom off a small percentage of the ad revenue.  The other way would be a trade agreement, allowing Viacom to advertise its new ventures on YouTube.  (For example, banners reading “Don’t miss ‘The Real World: Guantanamo,’ this Thursday at 10!”)  Either would be mutually beneficial for both companies.

  If nothing is done to settle this little dispute, however, it may very well mark the beginning of a slippery slope toward YouTube’s demise, and Google’s $1.65 billion dollar albatross.

-From Pulse
   November 2, 2006

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Viral Videos

  Move over MySpace, there’s a new king of high-traffic internet sites.  In a time of high-speed connections and program-it-yourself entertainment on demand, this was bound to happen.  YouTube has arrived. Today, 18 months after breaking virtual soil, it streams 70 million videos a day and is taking the world by storm.

  But like MySpace before it, YouTube’s success has prompted a flooding of the market—a market now replete with similar-service sites.  Just as FaceBook and TagWorld vied for MySpacers, a host of websites have begun to crop up with hopes of walking away with a chunk of the “viral video” cash cow.

  It’s only the first quarter, and still too early to predict an outcome in the online-video race; the cream hasn’t yet risen to the top.  The wheat and the chaff are still being separated.  But one thing is certain: the age of webcams, high-resolution camera phones, digital camcorders, easy uploading and no shortage of sites willing to host digital video (no matter how mundane) guarantees that this phenomenon will be around for as long as someone is willing to watch.

  Some may argue that video-on-demand sites like YouTube pose a threat to traditional television viewing—perhaps the same people who declared that iTunes was the next great threat to radio listenership.  I don’t buy it.  Just as the iPod provides a service that is different than radio, YouTube isn’t a cable channel.  It doesn’t do what television does. In the end, the iPod made the Walkman obsolete, not radio.  And I predict that YouTube and friends will become just another way to waste time at work.  You know, like MySpace.

  And speaking of MySpace, it’s a little early to count them out of this race.  Having just expanded video capabilities on the site, members can now upload their own videos and share them with friends.  MySpace also provides a boatload of exclusive video content, unavailable anywhere else on the web.  For example, this week MySpacers could watch exclusive interviews with Zach Braff and Method Man.

  With technology enabling a new generation of wannabe filmmakers to instantly distribute their virtual celluloid masterpieces worldwide, online video has become yet another outlet for the blogging set.  With these advances, a new term has entered the language: “vlog.”  Whereas “blog” is short for weblog, it’s no challenge to deduce that “vlog” is derived from video log.  And with a horde of sites hosting video almost indiscriminately, anyone with a webcam can have their own.  The downside is that you better make it good, because the competition is profuse.

  To explore the world of viral videos, you should probably start with YouTube.com.  You can also check out TV.blinkx.com, a video search engine.  If you’re posting your own videos, check out Revver.com, which actually pays you every time your video is viewed.  There are Google video and Yahoo video, too—not bad, but not the best.

  Just spend a little time surfing, and you’re sure to find something interesting.

-From Pulse
   August 24, 2006

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