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Jon Stewart, Lorne Michaels Come Out In Favour of YouTube
techdirt writes "Viacom employee Jon Stewart recently announced that he believes his bosses are making a mistake in taking Viacom content off of YouTube. Today, NBC employee and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels has stated he can't understand NBC's position on YouTube. The interview with Michaels is especially interesting, because it was a Saturday Night Live clip of the infamous 'Lazy Sunday' music video that is often credited with putting YouTube on the map. At the same time, however, almost everyone admitted that it did wonders in revitalizing SNL's reputation (as well as boosting Andy Samberg's reputation to new heights). Yet, NBC's lawyers shot it down, limiting the benefit to SNL. It appears that Michaels understands that, and says he wishes they could put more of the show on YouTube."
I was interested to read today that the ABC (that's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has a policy that allows for it's content to be used on other platforms by operators.
I found this out after content was taken down when a teenager pretended to be their representative and sent YouTube an infringement notice (complete with awful spelling, "Australian Broddcasting Corperation")! The kid has since apologised.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
They never will get it till its too late. The RIAA knew what was coming but instead of embracing the technology and switching their tactics over, they stumbled on their feet for too long and now look what has happened, they had to go with iTunes and share the profit/benefits. The problem all comes down to the profit/benefits. None of these companies want to deal with youtube because someone in the company realizes they can do it themselves and retain full profit/benefits without using youtube. Unfortunately, they will create their own system that is bulky, slow, and full of advertisements, DRM'd to hell, which in the end will just push the consumer away. Comedy Central did this with their "Mother Load", and its complete garbage compared to youtube.
What is happening is that the networks are wanting to prevent GOOGLE from owning them. Google is not a search. Google is an ad engine. They were iindirect competition against the networks, but with youtube, are now direct competition. The real problem here is that these companies are thinking like typical American companies. They do not want to be a big fish in an ocean. They wish to be what they consider a whale in a lake. Viacom and others are now working with several youtube wanna-bes because THEY are part owners of these companies. The media companies are hoping to own not just the content but the deliver system.
Imagine what would have happened had RIAA simply created a new company against napster back when napster first started AND then shut down napster? Today, it would be a mosnter. As it is, RIAA is probably in danger of having the musicians do their own thing, rather than go with a label. MPAA is part of that, and are now taking a different approach. BTW, they are also concerned that the young talent is slowly drifting away from them. If they are stuck making Barbi as Cinderella, or Escape from LA, while the indies run off elsewhere, then the studies will be in serious trouble.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. Jon Stewart is an entertainer whose personal fortune, success, and prestigate is much more closely tied to personal recognition and likeability rather than the long-term profitability of his network. Hence, he has every reason in the world to want to be associated with the 'free beer' aspects of let's put stuff on youtube.
2. lazy sunday's youtube success doubtlessly brought some fame back to SNL. however, to start as that as a premise and then argue that ergo snl/viacom should not care if the funniest bits of their shows are put onto the internet en masse by anonymous users is completely disingenious. more realistically, it makes sense from SNL's / the network's standpoint to be against random copyright infringing posts of clips from their show but to put carfully selected teaser bits up that may encourage viewers to their television show, where they actually make money through advertising. and this is exactly what they do.
It seems like everyone realizes what you're saying except the business people and the lawyers. For some reason, they think that content consumption is a zero sum game and that it's only beneficial to them if they're directly profiting off of it. It's not a big problem though. It's orders of magnitude easier for creators to get their work out to the public now, and the internet is getting a larger and larger share of audience attention. If they continue to keep bottling things up, people will just watch the content that's available to them online instead of trying to work their lives around the schedules of the TV shows they want to watch.
I don't care if a media dinosaur has some content on their website, I don't WANT to install real player to see a 100x100px mosaic of slow loading artefacts. The reason why youtube is now a household name is because their system actually works well.
They don't make you wait for your clip, like the other guys do (no, I do not want to buy your car, I know that after the one second it takes for me to know I'm watching a car ad, forcing me to sit and wait while you harass me with your car ad makes me want to hurt you, not give you money). Put the ads in non-obtrusive formats around the content, don't interfere with my access to the content, and I'll watch, otherwise I'll close that tab and move along.
I'm pretty sure that youTube is offering a profit sharing scheme with the content owners, and their own 100%-ours website can still offer a competing video service for the same content, this way they'd see which source of revenue is greater.
But it's not all about the ad revenue, it's about control. They want it over their revenue, their content, and their public. We want to be free.
We clash.
Youtube could be the beginning of the end for exclusive distribution, and that would be the start of something good for the public.
You can't take the sky from me...