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YouTube Restores Comedy Central Clips
ColinPL writes, "Though YouTube has removed Comedy Central clips, their corporate parent Viacom has confirmed that it wants to find some way to keep the clips available. Viacom has apparently given the green light for YouTube to put the material back up." Update: 11/02 20:49 GMT by Z : We received an email from DB Ferguson at the No Fact zone, letting us know things are a little more muddled than we might otherwise prefer. "This letter contains a link to Jeff's Idealog post where he had evidence that even more clips are disappearing, and I have copies of two Cease and Desist letters that were sent yesterday night from YouTube. The purge continues, despite the news reports that it has stopped or that videos are being put back in."
if this has anything to do with Steven Colbert's veiled attack against Viacom on his show last night?
Perhaps YouTube should have made an example of Viacom and not restored the clips on their own. This would be useful in making future requests from other parties think twice before requesting clips be pulled.
YouTube could have just told Viacom that the clips were pulled and that Viacom were free to upload them again assuming they specified that it was okay for the clips to be made available.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
When it comes to stuff like "The Daily Show" or "Colbert," these are programs that get shown once, rerun once, and then are mostly never seen again purely because of the topical nature of the shows. This isn't the sort of thing that fills out a DVD box all that well, they aren't really going to continue to profit directly from the old content once it's been and gone. This is why clips that get "youtubed" or rerun by CC on their own site and occasional "best ofs," are really the only way for people to continue to dig the old clips and drum up enthusiasm for the next episodes.
CC has realized that either they work the "best of" angle solely on their own site, with however much manpower and costs that would entail, or let the fans do it themselves on YouTube. With YouTube, not only do they not deal with the workload, but the fans themselves are in charge of what is or isn't a "greatest hit." That's as it should be, and something that the content producers rarely if ever get right, since all they'd have to go on are surveys, focus groups, and other troublesome hit-or-miss schemes.
1. Let the fans do the work of hyping up the shows.
2. More hype = more audience for the next ones. There are no ???s.
3. Profit!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I don't see why we should spend time educating ourselves on some cult very few have ever heard of when the cults of Christianity and Islam are everywhere and are significantly more powerful.