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YouTube Begins Defense, Seeks Depositions
eldavojohn writes "YouTube has begun their defense against Viacom by first calling on 30 depositions from people like Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert. While the article mentions that YouTube has not revealed what they hope to gain in these depositions, I think Jon Stewart's opinions will weigh in favor of YouTube. Comedy Central's parent company, Viacom, objects to YouTube's hosting of their content. Comedy Central hosts many Daily Show & Colbert Report clips on its own site, bringing in its own ad revenue."
You ask to depose a number of people, hoping that the inconvenience of the process will force the other side to back down. That's why Comedy Central has the Google founders on their deposition list. It's lawyering.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
Why don't content providers just go ahead and put all their shows up for downloading, stick all the adds they want in them, and tell people to download and copy them and give them away as much as they want? Can't they make a lot of money by advertising that way? Sure they wouldn't be able to track the results by Nielsen ratings, but the number of times the clips are downloaded should give them some measure of popularity to show advertisers and calculate advertising rates. I know an Israeli web site that I believe does something like this (for Israeli shows).
There's been a couple NPR interviews with Colbert, where he's obviously not in-character. Here's one, pre-Report: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4464017
He also hosted an episode of The Daily Show a few years back, and you can see the real Stephen interviewing David Cross.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
If they quit Viacom, it'd be kinda tough to get any more Daily Show or Colbert Report on the web, wouldn't it? They don't care about having their content "free" (as in speech) on YouTube. They want it on there "free" (as in beer) to generate a larger audience. They understand that if you give some users some free content, they'll be more likely to watch the show 'live' on TV when it first airs.
I know for me, watching Lazy Sunday on YouTube brought me back to checking out SNL again for the first time in several years...maybe that's just me though.
a talent like Stewart or Colbert (or, more likely, somebody lower down the comedy totem pole) did break off from their network host and try to self-employ themselves through the web? It's becoming more feasible, and participation in community sites like YouTube is an integral part of future marketing strategies for online video. Consider this business model for a news program, for instance:
1) Every day, broadcast a live stream of the show as it's recorded. If subscriptions are broken up into tiers, this would be the central feature of the top tier, perhaps along with perks like call-in segments in each interview, which by necessity only subscribers would have access to.
2) As soon as the show's recorded, it's automatically up for sale on iTunes and what have you, so that the passive fanbase can download it as a "vodcast" (or whatever term is trendy enough to take over).
3) Have an editing team on hand to create a shorter Headline News-style presentation to be thrown up on YouTube for general consumption. It would still give prospective customers a run-down of the day's news while encouraging them to buy or subscribe to the "full version."
An aspiring newscaster could implement the 3rd step first and then expand the format of their program as they gain fame, but an already-big name could probably plop the whole thing onto the Web at once and start raking in the bucks. From my perspective, this requires a critical mass of both consumers and producers to begin realizing that they can finally cut out a number of the middlemen.