YouTube: The beginning of the end
Oct 28th, 2006 | Comments (2)
Cue "The End" by The Doors, because the inevitable is starting to happen. YouTube's free ride is over, and with it, all that made it the giant that it is today.
Two stories just came out that may signal the beginning of the end for YouTube as we know it. 1000 sports clips have been taken down and there will be no more Comedy Central show clips. Now, granted, the sports clips are from formula one, the Uefa Champions League, the Football League, and Australian Open Tennis, but can the NFL, NBA and MLB be far behind? I doubt it.
The big blow is the Comedy Central deal. This is the first major attack of the copyright beast (or at least the first one that affects my life), and it certainly won't be the last. And it's a stupid one. YouTube has only helped The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and I think Stewart and Colbert know that. Colbert's Green Screen challenge was pure brilliance, and wouldn't have been possible (or nearly as successful) without YouTube. And I'll bet more people watched the World of Warcraft South Park episode on YouTube than they did on TV. That may seem like a bad thing, but anyone who watched it on YouTube obviously didn't have a TiVo channel set up for South Park. I'll bet a lot of them do now though.
It's the dawn of the video age. People now expect to be able to see video clips online and on their video iPods. YouTube, in its current form, is a beautiful thing. It's easy to find clips, it's easy to watch clips, and it's easy to add clips. Companies that start to demand that their content be taken off of YouTube had better have their own dead-simple, free online video viewing/downloading service. Otherwise, they're just yanking their product away from millions of potential viewers, which seems to fly in the face of logic. Plus, let's be honest, users will always find a way to get the clips somehow.
Content owners- Give the masses what they want - don't take it away. Just take a look at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Did they suffer from having their clips on YouTube? Hardly. Their audiences grew like crazy. It's called word-of-mouth. YouTube is the cause of that. YouTube helps not hurts. Pandora's box has been opened, and it can't be closed. Embrace it.
Two stories just came out that may signal the beginning of the end for YouTube as we know it. 1000 sports clips have been taken down and there will be no more Comedy Central show clips. Now, granted, the sports clips are from formula one, the Uefa Champions League, the Football League, and Australian Open Tennis, but can the NFL, NBA and MLB be far behind? I doubt it.
The big blow is the Comedy Central deal. This is the first major attack of the copyright beast (or at least the first one that affects my life), and it certainly won't be the last. And it's a stupid one. YouTube has only helped The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and I think Stewart and Colbert know that. Colbert's Green Screen challenge was pure brilliance, and wouldn't have been possible (or nearly as successful) without YouTube. And I'll bet more people watched the World of Warcraft South Park episode on YouTube than they did on TV. That may seem like a bad thing, but anyone who watched it on YouTube obviously didn't have a TiVo channel set up for South Park. I'll bet a lot of them do now though.
It's the dawn of the video age. People now expect to be able to see video clips online and on their video iPods. YouTube, in its current form, is a beautiful thing. It's easy to find clips, it's easy to watch clips, and it's easy to add clips. Companies that start to demand that their content be taken off of YouTube had better have their own dead-simple, free online video viewing/downloading service. Otherwise, they're just yanking their product away from millions of potential viewers, which seems to fly in the face of logic. Plus, let's be honest, users will always find a way to get the clips somehow.
Content owners- Give the masses what they want - don't take it away. Just take a look at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Did they suffer from having their clips on YouTube? Hardly. Their audiences grew like crazy. It's called word-of-mouth. YouTube is the cause of that. YouTube helps not hurts. Pandora's box has been opened, and it can't be closed. Embrace it.
Let's face it, YouTube's foundation is copyrighted material. Without it, it's still a valuable service, but nothing compared with the $1.6 billion company it is right now.