« Bunker Hill Trailer | Main | Taking a Break/The Departed »
February 2, 2007
Valuing Viacom
Via Talking Points Memo: Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and many other cable networks, has demanded that YouTube take down over 100,000 clips containing content from those networks.
I don't really care about Viacom's bottom line, but this strikes me as a really bad idea. As a YouTube spokesperson noted, Viacom will no longer benefit from YouTube's "passionate audience," thus losing out on potential audiences for their shows. Video sharing sites such as YouTube would seem especially beneficial for shows such as The Colbert Report and The Daily Show that make use of short sketches that work well in the format of streaming video and often find wide audiences very quickly via email and blogs.
Update: Here's another article on this controversy from the Washington Post, including a comment from CBS indicating that clips on YouTube may have helped boost the network's ratings. In the previous version of this entry, I may have overstated the relationship between finding audiences on YouTube and translating those audiences into larger audiences for specific shows, but I do think the ratings controversy itself is part of a larger definitional issue, as television networks and movie studios attempt to make sense of how new media fit into the entertainment industry.
Posted by chuck at February 2, 2007 4:44 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wordherders.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.fpl/6209
Comments
I am with you on this one Chuck. I can't believe that even from a PR standpoint that this makes sense. Small note, via Wired, MTV has a licensing agreement to share revenue with Google. Also, just to point out, an interesting Business Week article that suggests there might be some bluffing going on.
Posted by: Agnes Varnum at February 4, 2007 2:11 PM
I figured this might be a bluff designed to get a larger share of YouTube and Google's ad revenue and probably should have suggested as much in my initial comments. Thanks for the links that offer that interpretation.
Posted by: Chuck at February 4, 2007 4:08 PM