Viacom Pulls Clips Off YouTube. Again.
Looks like somebody’s getting greedy and playing hardball. Viacom just pulled clips off YouTube. Again. Viacom fans and remixers on YouTube — arguably Viacom’s most powerful viral marketers — are pissed.
Henry Blodgett hits the nail on the head: this is a negotiating tactic sacrificing long-term growth to satisfy short-term greed.
After getting stiffed in negotiations with YouTube (details, anyone?), Viacom has demanded that YouTube remove 100,000 unauthorized Viacom clips. Although this is obviously little more than another negotiating tactic (like the preposterous idea floated a few months ago about the creation of a Big Media YouTube Clone), it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
YouTube could presumably argue that, legally, it is not responsible for what individuals choose to upload (as long as its user-agreements make clear that they aren’t allowed to upload pirated clips). Unlike the file-sharing start-up of the month, moreover, YouTube has the resources to make sure that a court battle drags on for years–at which point Viacom and every other network will probably be paying YouTube for distribution rather than the other way around.
Viacom presumably knows at least the first part of this (and is presumably in denial about the “one day we’ll be paying YouTube for distribution” part). So one wonders just how far it will go to force YouTube to remove all the offending content. And in the meantime, of course, it will sacrifice all the promotion and revenue that it would have gotten had it found a way to agree to play ball.
Silly little TV executives. CBS has already proven that YouTube exposure increases TV viewership. No matter: if Viacom wants to join the fall of TV by clinging to their top-down illusions of the way online media works, let them. That just leaves more room for other people to climb the YouTube charts — and soon, make money through revenue sharing.
Remember that guy who got fired from Viacom for not buying MySpace? Somebody at Viacom needs to get fired for this YouTube deadlock.
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About the Author
Mike Abundo serves as Vice-President for Online Services of the Philippine Internet Commerce Society. He also writes for Inside Online Video and Tech Side Up. Email him at mike@mikeabundo.com.
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It always amuses me whenever I hear this kind of stupidity from dumb execs.
No more Daily Show or Colbert Report on YouTube? Fine. I will never use YouTube again.
Oh, and since this is the second time this happens, I have totally lost my patience with YouTube, Viacom, and Comedy Central. You don’t want me as viewer? Fine. I will watch something else, somewhere else. Forget that I even found out about the Daily Show on YouTube… These stupid losers think that people spend all day long in front of the TV. Not any more. I watch what I want when I want. If you take it away, I won’t chase you to your little TV show at the time you decide. I forget you and move on to something else…
[...] Viacom’s YouTube takedown was even more indiscriminate than ABS-CBN’s takedown, somehow sweeping videos completely unrelated to Viacom. [...]
It seems Viacom’s hardball tactics even extend to just its logo in the corner of the screen. Hundreds of old “Sesame Street” clips got yanked (and their posters got barred), even though the clips had been there for months, and, technically, Viacom doesn’t own the material; Sesame Workshop does (and it doesn’t seem to have a problem, because it knows that clips on YouTube are great advertising). BUT! A lot of those clips had been taped off Noggin, which is owned by Viacom, and as such, they had the Noggin logo in the corner of the screen. So Viacom ordered them taken down, because of that logo, not because Viacom actually owned the content of the clip. It’s as though an original user-created clip happened to have a TV in the background, on which “Spongebob” was playing. Even though that TV was so tiny and quiet that you could scarcely detect it, Viacom would claim copyright infringement and order the clip removed.
I’ve heard of quite a lot of cases of totally innocent, totally original clips, with nothing at all to do with any Viacom content or product, being arbitrarily removed.
As for me, with the huge amounts of spam I’ve gotten since registering on YouTube, not to mention the hassle of weeding through 1000-word blocks of keyword spam (much of it containing obscenities) in order to find what I’m looking for, I’ve left YouTube. If they’re going to go at this like someone using an atomic bomb to kill a housefly, I say, to hell with them all. In England, the equivalent of the Finger is the V-Sign. And that’s precisely what I’m giving to YouTube and to Viacom.
[...] the TV content vacuum left by the Viacom pulldown, NBC’s YouTube channel was perfectly positioned to take over and make money in the coming revenue share. Too bad some moron just took [...]
[...] Posted on March 2nd, 2007 in Video by Mike Abundo Paul Kaputska hits the nail on the head: Viacom’s YouTube pulldown and the new NBC chief’s mad ramblings are just pathetic, impatient cries for more money. [...]
[...] course, it’s typical of offline media giants and their online puppets to go back on their word in dealings with independent online media entities. Don’t be surprised if MySpace kicks [...]
[...] pulling non-infringing clips from YouTube, including those protected by fair use, Viacom relents on this [...]
[...] screwed a lot of people with their indiscriminate YouTube takedown, but at least this Stephen Colbert parody is back. Find out why on Inside Online Video. [...]