Google’s YouTube provides a service that lets people upload videos to their site for free hosting and download. YouTube has a warning on the home page that basically says "don’t post other people’s copyrighted material," but, of course, people do.
Google is of the opinion that as long as it removes copyrighted material promptly when specifically asked, it’s in the clear. However, they had promised media owners that they were going to install a content monintoring service earlier this year to deal with the problem of pirated videos. They didn’t.
Viacom says there are pver 100,000 clips on YouTube service that belong to them and these clips have generated 1.2 billion video streams. Meanwhile, Google collects the revenue from these views and does not share it with Viacom.
Viacom says "take them all off now and keep them off."
I’ve got an opinion about this one, but what do you think?
Ken
P.S. I’ve taken the best of the original "how to" System Video Blog articles and put them into a convenient report format.
Free to System Video Blog readers and their friends.
P.P.S. System 2007 is April 27 – 29 in Chicago. I haven’t started advertising yet and we’re more than half sold out. One of these days I’m going to get around to actually running a few promotions and I’m pretty sure we’ll sell the remaining seats pretty fast.
There’s an early bird offer in play – for now. Here it is:
Before that, he worked on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet.
In addition to being an under-geek, Bob is also a master salesman.
Let me quote something about Bob from Emanuel Rosen’s excellent book "Anatomy of Buzz."
"Bob Metcalfe, father of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, told Scott Kirsner how young MIT engineers often came to him for advice.
After they go through his six-story town home in Boston’s Back Bay, many of them say something like "Wow! What a great house! I want to invent something like Ethernet."
At this point Metcalfe has to sit down and explain, "No, I don’t have this house because I invented Ethernet. I have this house because I went to Cleveland and Schenectady and places like that. I sold Ethernet for a decade."
OK, with that as a background, listen carefully to what Bob has to say about video and salesmanship, especially in the post script at the very end of the interview. Profound stuff.
YouTube…it’s not the only free video hosting site in the world, but it definitely has the highest profile.
Everyone from Chevrolet to Warner Brothers to Paris Hilton is in the game.
What’s the appeal of YouTube to these big bucks promoters? Are there any guerilla-type YouTube "secrets" us little guys can use to get more promotional bang from the service?
It’s the newest project of the BabyUniverse.com, an Internet conglomerate which describes itself as "the leading content, commerce, and new media company in the pregnancy, baby, and toddler marketplace."
Not a bad place to be. New parents spend A LOT of money.
They don’t have much choice about it either and the new babies keep coming – thank God.
The site has a lot of bugs (at least with my Firefox-Apple set up), but I like where they’re going with it.
It offers articles, video on demand, and what they call "Baby U-Tube" which will let folks upload their own videos. I think it makes a TON of sense to offer produced content and user-provided content.
What I’m not sold on is the need for 24/7 streaming "live" TV which they also offer. Then again, maybe it’s a relief for mom’s to just turn the set on and watch without having to make a decision. Lord knows that’s how people have been conditioned to interact with TV and radio.
I guess technically it’s no big deal. Just line up all the programs you want to stream and push start and there’s your live TV. I still have a visceral memory of hosting a radio show and appearing on television programs. A very hand on, big overhead undertaking. But with "Live" Internet TV, you probably don’t need a soul other than someone to keep an eye on the server from time to tim.
The community that’s grown up around this blog is now one year old plus a few days. The blog was "born" on December 15 which I guess makes it a Sagittarius.
What does 2007 hold?
I honestly don’t know, but I do know this:
Last year, I posted eighty-six articles and received 434 comments. Not bad for a spare time effort.
I also know that when we started, most folks weren’t too sure that Internet video had much a future. It seems kind of marginal and faddish, they said.
Then a long came YouTube and the cover of Time Magazine.
I think Internet video is here to stay…
What do you think?
Got any predictions or hot ideas for Internet video in 2007?
I went to (and hosted) a lot of conference and workshops in November.
Maybe too many. I’m still trying to digest them all.
Here’s something interesting that happened at one of them. It was a three day event so I skipped some of the live presentations with the idea that I’d catch them later on video.
One of the speakers sent me an e-mail of his talk a few days after the program with a link to watch the video of his talk online. I did.
Three weeks later, we were on the phone talking about his presentation and for a minute I couldn’t remember whether I’d seen it live or on video.
Am I losing my memory? Am I trying to jam too much info in in too short a period of time?
No. Video is powerful. It’s so close to "real life" that under certain circumstances your memory will encode video events as if they actually happened in real life.
If you’re not blown away by the obvious sales applications in a phenomenon that, you’re probably not cut out for sales and marketing.
I can tell you from first hand experience that NO ONE in the spring of 1994 had any idea how to use the web to advertise.
I know that because at the time I was in regular communication with the inventor of the web browser (Marc Andreessen) and he had no idea and if he hadn’t heard a bright idea from someone, somewhere on the topic, the answer was not out there.
Dave Taylor had identified the opportunity in online catalogs and was publishing what was then the ONLY guide to online stores, but beyond that we were all drawing a blank.
Interestingly though, one of the ideas that Marc had way back then is finally coming into its own…
Google continues to add elements to Google Video that mirror YouTube’s video sharing service.
New addition: Now Google Video lets you see how many times a particular video has been viewed, both cummulatively and yesterday.
This is big stuff because traditionally Google likes to keep its traffic data to itself. In some cases, when you’re doing business with them, they’ll let you see your own data, but that’s as far as they go.
For Google to open their video data to the world shows what an important piece showing the "ratings" are when it comes making the new video-sharing medium click.
By the way, Google Video now accounts for 2% of Google’s traffic. Not a big percentage, but in absolute terms, a whole lot of action.