SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE
(Update 2.20.96: The New York Times has a good article today on this story, and Jason Calacanis has an impassioned post arguing the case for NBC)
BoingBoing notes that YouTube, the rapidly growing video uploading service yesterday
reported getting a "Cease and Desist" letter from the suits at NBC, asking them to pull the virally popular "Lazy Sunday" music video from Saturday Night Live (SNL). Techdirt also has a good story on it.
Like millions who've enjoyed the video on the internet, after missing it on SNL, I too, will miss viewing it over and over again on YouTube when the mood strikes.
It's a loss for YouTube, with "Lazy Sunday" being it's "most watched" video of all time on the service until yesterday, with over 3 million "Views".
YouTube noted on it's blog:
""Lazy Sunday
Hi Tubers! NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website."
This confrontation has been long expected. As I noted in a post a few days ago, copyrighted videos on these free video distribution services will:
"...probably have the traditional media industry come down on it like a ton of bricks, much like the traditional music industry did in the original Napster."
In fact, the last few months have been kind of like the period just before World War I broke out in 1914. Everyone knew that war would come...but nobody knew when the first shot would be fired.
Well, Crazy Sunday is playing the role of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and YouTube is standing in for Sarajevo, the site for the assassin's shot that was heard around the world.
A bit dramatic, but the point remains the same. We're now in for a period of fierce trench warfare, as the mainstream media companies feel compelled one by one, to join the fray, in order to "protect" their video content assets from being shared liberally on the Internet, courtesy of burgeoning services like YouTube, Vimeo, and the like.
And if you think they're not burgeoning, take a look at the next statement by YouTube on it's blog, following the announcement of the nasty-gram from NBC above:
"Some good news: we are happy to report that YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month with 20,000 videos being uploaded daily. Keep broadcasting!"
Those are scary, and fighting words for the keepers and purveyors of mainstream video content. They're going to want to smack it down hard.
Ultimately, both sides will see their view through to win-win business models, much as we're starting to do for music, as I hoped for in the aforementioned previous post.
But in the meantime, we're going to burn through a ton of time and resources that are going to be the unnecessary casualties of war.
Thanks for the Vimeo mention, but there's practically no content on there that isn't owned by the person who uploaded it.
Posted by: Jakob Lodwick | Monday, February 20, 2006 at 11:31 AM
You ought to check out www.metacafe.com, the user experience is much cleaner than youtube. You will also not that on Metacafe, submitters have begun licensing their content to the site. See this article at http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2006/02/14/business/doc43f219b34bde1132959781.txt
"With the antique podcast successfully under his belt, R.C. launched a podcast of clips from “Protect and Serve” the day after Christmas. Titled Security Guard Theatre, the podcast has received 88,131 hits. Recently, he allowed a Sri Lankan website called MetaCafe to use three clips of Security Guard. Within 10 hours, 2,524 people visited the site."
Posted by: Michael Eisenberg | Sunday, February 26, 2006 at 05:56 AM
Youtube is a great web site video sharing site, Google made all the right moves by purchasing Youtube even if other CEO's think they overpaid for it, i think they got it for very cheap. Youtube is now a brand that will be around for a long long time, and given Google's commitment to advancements in practical internet technology, it can all only get better and better as the years and decades pass, Youtube will be around on 2010, 2020, 2030, and so on.. it will more than pay for itself specially given the rate of inflation and so on 1.6billion is really nothing, divide it into few pieces for the Youtube founders, minus the IRS costs and etc, and they each end up no more than few hundred million, which if you think about it, is not all that much. a million is basicly 500x $1000 times 2. even middle income people spend $1000 in a single day nowadays, not much at all Google made the best moves ever. There are also other great video sharing web sites such as Motiono , here take a look at this interesting video for motiono ( http://en.sevenload.com/videos/Ocb9YNx/Motiono-com-3 ) i upload videos to motion often, it is not as decent as Youtube but still pretty neat.
Posted by: Motiono | Monday, June 25, 2007 at 02:37 AM