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."

Comments

A good start...

[grub]

Comedy Central's clips are a start. A more serious matter is the misuse of the DMCA in efforts to stifle criticism.

An offshoot of the Scientology cult known as The Landmark Forum is using the DMCA against YouTube, Google and The Internet Archive because of a scathing French documentary about Landmark being shared on those sites. It aired in France to 1.5 million people, a month later Landmark pulled out of France. Story at the EFF's site and other news sources.

The video with English subtitles is available via BitTorrent at PirateBay, search eMule for "Inside Landmark Forum" or view it online at DailyMotion.

Colbert Report

[AKAImBatman]

If this video from Stephen Colbert is any indication, then Comedy Central may have felt different about the clips than Viacom did. Based on my observations of the situation, the YouTube clips were generating a lot of free advertisement for Comedy Central. Especailly some of their news commentary, which is quite good despite the humor. For myself, I had no inkling of Comedy Central's news commentary until I bumped across Jon Stewart's commentary on Internet Tubes. Their followup with Senator McCain was brilliant, and John Hodgman's analysis was an example of razor sharp wit. (And hey, you've got to love the, "I'm a PC" bit.)

Had it not been for YouTube, I never would have found out about Comedy Central. I'd start tuning in, but I've disconnected my cable. Yet I recently noticed that Jon Stewart's show is up on iTunes. Hmmm..... ;)

CC gets it!

[Rob T Firefly]

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!