A few days after YouTube
yanked a bunch of copyright-infringing clips at the request of Viacom-owned Comedy Central, Adweek reports that
the two companies are getting chummy, and YouTube has reposted an unspecified number of the offending videos. Quoth a Viacom rep: "We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we're interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences." Viacom hasn't yet entered a licensing agreement with YouTube, as other companies including CBS, NBC, and a few major record companies have. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. As I've
said before, video sharing (i.e. the kind people can embed in their web site or blog) is one of the most powerful promotional tools available to media companies right now, and ignoring that opportunity becomes more and more suicidal every day.
Tags: comedy central, ComedyCentral, copyright, google, viacom, youtube
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Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsDylan A. NickelsNov 1st 2006 1:57PM
The view espoused at the end of this post, that embedded and shared video is a wonderful promotional tool and that it is "suicidal" to ignore it is currently a very popular opinion. I remain, however, unconvinced of its veracity. Is there an example of a company that has suffered for ignoring shared video? While its true that I enjoyed watching the daily show and colbert report clips on YouTube, when they were pulled I did not turn to comedy central to fill the void. It seems to me that Comedy Central is providing content that they are not being rewarded for monetarily if it is available for free on the internet. Perhaps some medium is required.
Arc|AngelNov 1st 2006 8:25PM
I believe SNL had a ratings increase partially as a result of sharing of their recent music video segments. The show had had constantly dwindling ratings over the last few years and has now seen an upswing in the numbers as a result.