February 10th, 2007
The Real Problem For YouTube
Everyone assumed that when Viacom demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 clips of Viacom content, it was just a hardball negotiating tactic…but maybe it wasn’t. What if Viacom suddenly realized that they don’t need YouTube.
I went to ComedyCentral.com, and thanks to a recently introduced embedding feature, here I am with a Comedy Central clip on my blog. Isn’t that a huge part of YouTube’s appeal?
So maybe I don’t have full access to all Comedy Central shows, and I can’t edit the clips, but give Viacom some time. They’re just getting started.
If I were YouTube, I’d think long and hard about a business model based on cats flushing toilets and flatulence flambe. Anyone with any kind of professional interest in their video content will soon realize that YouTube’s platform is increasingly a comodity, and that if your content is 1) really good, and 2) embedable, you’re pretty much good to go, regardless of which platform you use.
If YouTube hopes to keep any of these professional video creators (broadly defined) on their platform, they better get moving with that revenue sharing, and it better be a NICE share.
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A quick response:
http://mike.teczno.com/notes/simple-video-service.html
I’m liking the idea of Amazon’s S3 providing a public storage layer for the general internet, super useful for exactly this kind of thing. It would take no more than a simple client application that can do video encoding and HTTP uploads to provide hosted, embedded video without having to resort to a shared video service.
If Amazon can make their signup process less dorky, developers could start to rely on users providing their own hosting, which would be an interesting to the current trend of centralization.
It’s going to be real interesting to see where this goes. The one factor neither you nor Mike touch upon is search. If I want to find a Stewart clip the first place I’ll go to look is YouTube, and honestly without reading this post I wouldn’t even think of going to Comedy Central itself. If Viacom is successful in keeping YouTube clear of it’s content, and on a cursory glance it’s not, then I’d go to Google as my number two option, and that of course brings up a huge conflict of interest…
Claiming YouTube’s business model is “based on cats flushing toilets and flatulence flambe” strikes be as some serious hyperbole. At least among those I talk to the real driver is access to the masses of archived content (aka OPP for Other People’s Property). A lot of this content was already scattered across the web before YouTube, but it was maddeningly hard to find. YouTube created an environment for successful tagging, ranking and collating which in turn allowed for the first really successful video search engine, albeit one that only searches one site. And without that supporting environment video search still sucks. Viacom has the clout and resources to get people to their site in numbers, but very few organizations have the media reach they do. Any number of people can roll out YouTube clones, but how will people find the content? That’s a six billion dollar question, but it’s unclear if anyone can step up and answer it yet…
[…] video service Scott Karp writes: If I were YouTube, I’d think long and hard about a business model based on cats flushing toilets […]
[…] The Real Problem For YouTube » Publishing 2.0 with some response from both me and the excellent Mike Migurski in the comments. Posted by William Blaze at February 11, 2007 03:54 PM Comments […]
The technology of the platform may be a commodity, but it’s not just movie file storage space that YT offers, just as it’s not just photo storage space that Flickr offers. Findability, allowing comments, letting people build connections via tags…those are what’s valuable about YT. Sure, viacom can build a technical copy of one feature–embedding–but now people have to search on multiple channels (comedy central, MTV, Vh1, etc.) to find content. And they have to post it to blogs to comment on it.
I’ve been enjoying YouTube most when it functions as a collective memory pool.
As copyright owners have gotten better at taking down clips, this use has diminished a lot. I was recently on a Phil Hartman kick and found a bunch of old Saturday Night Live skits (Lothar Of The Hill People, Sinatra Group, etc.), and got a lot of enjoyment from watching them and passing them around. They were taken down just days after I first found them, and I haven’t been able to find replacements since. Why is NBC trying to edit itself out of their former viewer’s social memory, or do they even realize that’s what they’re doing? It’s like the NYT seceding from online conversation by throwing up the TimesSelect pay wall for their most conversation-worthy pieces.
I guess I trust that search will improve when the copyright militia cat-and-mouse game stops, and people can feel free to use meaningful labels on clips the post on the internet.
[…] turned his site into a social network this weekend, hoping to create a venue for his … [Link] The Real Problem For YouTubePosted 12 hours agoEveryone assumed that when Viacom demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 clips […]
The Real Problem For YouTube
[…] Karp thinks that Viacom pulling its videos from YouTube makes strategic sense. If I were YouTube, I’d think long and hard about a business model based on cats flushing toilets […]
There’s no future for any site that redistributes copyrighted information without the permission of the content’s owner. More companies should follow Viacom’s lead. Take your clips off YouTube and put them on your own site with all the same services.
Then if YouTube wants to make the embed code searchable on its own site, so be it. It’s not like Google copies everyone’s Web sites. It’s indexing them. YouTube should take a similar tact. My guess is that if YouTube accepted feeds of video embed tags, then media companies would line up to send clips.
It is true that YouTube is in danger of losing their professional video creators; it is somewhat likely to happen if Viacom continues its quest. As for the private companies, such as Comedy Central, jumping on the bandwagon of embedding clips, I cannot believe they have not done it earlier. Many television stations are airing episodes of their shows on-line a few hours after the episode has premiered. ABC has their primetime shows available to watch on-line for free; incase someone misses the show and does not have tivo. Although, the act of private companies embedding their shows and Viacom taking away their clips will not result in the demise of YouTube because YouTube offers something the others do not. YouTube is filled with numerous amounts of home videos; some may show people dancing or acting silly while others may be cell phone clips of important events. These cell phone clips are being considered a new form of media; if reporters are not there to capture the actions then an average citizen can. Viacom cannot take away these kinds of clips, and I believe these clips create most of YouTube’s appeal.
power to decide how their films and shows are made. It is an admirable defense to Viacom’s command, but the real concern should be whether a judge will think the argument is applicable to the copy write laws. Putting legal affairs aside, Scott Karp (http://publishing2.com/2007/02/10/the-real-problem-for-youtube/) believ[IMG ]es the issue will dissolve due to the appeal of YouTube’s platform. For a while now, YouTube has been the new “it thing†on the web, but did it really expect other companies to not catch up? Private companies have seen the success
The “cats flushing toilets and flatulence flambe” wasn’t the business model - rather, that was the “substantial non-infringing use” that kept them out of court long enough to be bought-out for the megabucks, benefitting from the, err, other use. They learned the lesson of Napster VERY well.
[…] scott karp at publishing2 (who i respect immensely) wrote a post the other day about viacom, comedy central and competing with youtube… […]
Scott Karp writes: If I were YouTube, I’d think long and hard about a business model based on cats flushing toilets and flatulence flambe. Anyone with any kind of professional interest in their video content will soon realize that YouTube’s platform is increasingly a
1. YouTube embeds all those videos from other sites using the other site’s embed codes.
2. YouTube users can still vote and comment on those videos, and find them easily
3. YouTube serves ads and doesn’t have to pay for bandwidth.
4. YouTube wins.
Erste Umsetzung in den USA gibt es bereits, das bekanntestes Beispiel ist sicherlich Viacom, die YouTube unter anderem deshalb dazu aufgefordert haben 100 000 Videos zu löschen um Seiten wie ComedyCentral usw. zu fördern. Scott Karp bringt die Entwicklung wunderbar auf den Punkt: Anyone with any kind of professional interest in their video content will soon realize that YouTube’s platform is increasingly a comodity, and that if your content is 1) really good, and 2) embedable, you’re pretty much good to go, regardless of
This ain’t real fresh, but I hadn’t seen it… Found on Scott Karp’s Web 2.0, wherin he notes that Comedy Central has built in bunch of slick embedding tools. Neat huh? Now I gotta figure out who provides their player…