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TV and Movies On YouTube?
CNet is running a story speculating on the potential for full-length television shows and movies on YouTube. Google has been looking for ways to improve the popular but unprofitable video-sharing site, including some experiments with movies that exceed the typical 10-minute limit. Incorporating a system similar to Hulu could draw the interest of more advertisers.
"[Mark Cuban] wrote that Hulu is crushing YouTube in revenue per video and revenue per user primarily because 'Hulu has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site,' Cuban wrote. 'It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy.' YouTube doesn't have the same luxury because it can advertise only 'on the small percentage of videos on its site that it has a licensing deal with.'"
Movies and TV episodes, posted on YouTube! Why did no one think of that let alone DO IT before?
There is nothing stopping the traditional advertising model working in this distribution model. Show say a tiny Coca Cola (or whatever) logo in the top left corner of episode or movie that you are showing, and the advertiser would be happy!
I think this could be a win win situation for everyone, and could also spill over into the p2p distribution market en masse.
That's my hope anyway, as I'm sick and tired of internet distribution channels being demonised as for pirates only... meh
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
Perhaps Youtube should look into some of the most popular videos uploaded to their site. For example, if lots of people want to upload short 2-3 minute clips of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report to Youtube, maybe that says something about their popularity? So, instead of deleting it due to copyvios, maybe they should try a little harder to sign a deal with Viacom to get those shows hosted, with ads. That'd solve two problems right there -- less people uploading the copyrighted material, and more ads for them.
I'm sorry, but I can't comment on Hulu's model; the reason? Their overzealous country-restrictions: none of their clips are available outside of the US. I guess I could trick the server by using a proxy, but if a site makes me jump through hoops like this I go to the competition; especially since this sort of country-selective blocking is something I can't remember seing on YouTube, Revver or any of the other streaming video sites.
Why have an internationally accessible website at all, if you won't even show (short, low-quality, low resolution) videos except for US-Americans? Why should, say, bloggers even bother to embed those videos on the world-wide web, if they can't reach an world-wide audience?
Although I guess it could make embedding targeted ads easier, since you know your audience...
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Back when YouTube first came about, they had original regular running series. Some of them were actually decent too. Then things started to change and now we have a different YouTube.
Besides, it's not as if people don't already do this on YouTube themselves. I'm more surprised that at some point they haven't aggressively tried making money from this in some fashion.
Taxpayers haven't paid any money towards content creation. And good content is expensive. If you are happy watching things like the Phil DeFranco show or Hot for Words, good for you. But if you want something like Battlestar Galactica or Heroes, then *every episode* has to bring in millions of dollars somehow. That's hard to manage. This is not a solved problem.
Remember, Mark Cuban also claims to have made his saving throw to disbelieve the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. If I were Google, I'd rely on my own attorneys for legal advice, and not some self-important blowhard who pretends that important legal concepts don't exist when they don't protect his own financial interests.
How dare you point out the logical flaws in the free entertainment arguments. You are obviously anti-freedom.
1. Cost of Production
2. Cost of Distribution
3. Customer Price Sensitivity and General Interest
1. Cost of Production is still high and will remain high, though the bang for the buck is certainly increasing. While I don't enjoy police procedurals, you'll note that the production values are easily eclipsing movies in all but ginormous action set pieces. Shows like the original Battlestar Galactica were prohibitively expensive even with recycled special effects. The new Galactica, while the scripts still suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, it looks fantastic. Hollywood would have had an impossible time churning something out like that with models, Babylon 5's CGI looks dated now. Fans in their bedrooms are turning out CGI better than what a professional studio was doing ten years ago. Funny point: when that new B5 Lost Tales DVD was being put together, the new effects crew was scrambling for models. All of the original files were turned over to WB as per contract and were lost. The fans stepped in and provided a station model better than what was in the original show. You can only imagine what we'll be seeing in another decade. Still, it's going to cost money to put a proper show together and that will be the biggest barrier to entry.
2. Distribution. The Internet is a dagger in the heart of the conventional network business model. The suits are desperately trying to coopt it. Right now, the Internet's biggest vulnerability is that service is provided by telecoms and cable companies so the suits are looking to these companies to serve as gatekeepers. The suits would like to see the Net tamed into a comfy AOL model, putting up barriers to entry, filtering people only to approved and partnered sites, making sure they can start extracting profits again. I'm not sure if what we're looking at here is Tienanmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall -- I don't know if efforts to stop democratizing forces will succeed or fail. If they do fail, the networks will fall into ever-decreasing relevance.
3. Price Sensitivity and General Interest. The vast majority of people are casual fans of whatever they're into, they're usually not obsessive geeks. Miss an episode of a series? Not care if you don't see it? I never could understand that. But I'm a geek. Geeks are the ones who were buying Trek on tape back when it worked out to something like $10 per episode. DVD's finally made it feasible to distribute archived shows from the past and distribute new productions directly to the customer. While there have been direct-to-video schlockfests for years, Disney being a prime offender, there hasn't been as much interest in distributing things like episodic television content directly to DVD. Of course, with digital distribution, the DVD angle becomes only an interest if someone wants to keep the show permanently.
I suppose you can also throw a fourth category in here, generational adaptation of technology. People my parent's age would tape a show and play it back, not fast-forwarding through the commercials. Even more likely, they'd not be able to figure out how to record it and just watch it live. But the younger the viewer, the more readily they will adapt to the new technologies. Fast-forward another decade and you'll see middle-aged people perfectly acclimated to watching content on their laptops and ipods and cell phones. And I think that this sort of independence of choice in both content and viewing behavior will create a demand that the suits will be unable to control.
Right now there's really a conversation going on between viewers and content producers/distributors. The producer/distributors are saying "Shut up and pay what we demand, you cunts" and the viewers are saying "no thank you. We don't want your commercial-laden television, we don't want to pay $12 to go watch a movie that has 20 minutes of commercials in front of it, we don't want to be limited to just your approved content. And what you have that we like, you charge too much or you dick with show's creator to mess it all up."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The studios screwed themselves on this one.
...the full 2-hour-long version of Loituma girl. I always felt that truncating this rich experience to a mere 10 minutes was a travesty.
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Especially for a google property, I find their flash player to be of really poor quality. The seek bar (or whatever it's called) never goes to where you drop it, and there are really only a handful of places you can seek to if you want to see a part over again. It seems like every other flash video player I've come across behaves as I'd expect it to.
And it's annoying as hell to have the dock-esque related videos pop up any time my mouse goes near the vid.
Yeah, but Mark Cuban is an idiot that puts his interest before anyone Else's, so why should Google listen to him? I think this is the same Cuban who said the internet is "dead and boring" and that "We have reached the point of diminishing returns with today's internet." Really Mark? That's why you blog among other things and try to give advice to Google about making money on...the internet? This just in Mark: No one cares what you think, you've burned out...and you're now dead and boring, if you were ever anything else.
Google has more than enough money to develop their own shows, or just outright purchase an existing major show like House or The Office.
Imagine if Google purchased House and put all the full length episodes on Youtube, and then continued the series, allowing the episodes to only be viewed on Youtube and then eventually released on DVD. They could completely revolutionize the way Tv is done and make a bundle in the process.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Google does not want to get into the business of "content creation". They make their money being the access portal (one way or another) to other people's content. Whether that's through Google Search/News/etc.
As soon as they enter the content market (whether that be for entertainment television, news of any sort, books, or music), they will make competitors out of other content companies. These companies will fight (or fight harder) Google's push to get all content indexed. The current fight for this is with Google books, scanning the entire book to make it searchable and allowing a reasonable portion of the book to be viewed "free".
As Google pushes the limits of fair use (which, IMHO, I think is a good thing), the last thing they want to do is antagonize the content producers. That means sticking with the script of, "Look, we can help bring more consumers to your products by having them find you through us". Becoming a competitor to these companies weakens that argument substantially; they think Google will give preferential treatment to their own content (which they probably would).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan