aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Viacom v YouTube & the thin blue line
The chest-beating from Viacom and now NBC Universal are the inevitable tactics of an industry that’s fighting for its life as wave after wave of disruptive technologies and innovations threaten to crush the ship that has kept us afloat for so many years. As content creators, these entertainment companies have the right to do whatever they wish regarding “their” content. The problem is that once it has aired, people think of it as theirs.
This is not a new twist to human nature. We’ve been able to tape programs for decades and share them with our friends. What’s new is this digital thing; it’s just so much easier now. And the graph below from Alexa shows the problem for Viacom. I’ve compared YouTube’s traffic (the red line) with comedycentral.com (the blue line). The comedycentral.com line is jammed to the bottom by YouTube - so much so that you can’t even see it.
Terry goes on to explain how YouTube is the new spectrum and, after observing that at any given time 3 to 5 of the top 100 videos are ads, concludes that broadcasters “ought to be experimenting in this space. After all, it doesn’t cost a dime to do it.”
Via Steve Safran, “When you pull clips from YouTube, you don’t get them at your site. You just lose them, period.”
