Jordan Running at dowloadsquad has an entry talking about Comedy Central yanking clips off YouTube. As he points out, totally within the content holders rights, totally appropriate (smart) for GoogleTube to comply.
But dumb. Just off the scale dumb.
My university attending daughter learned about The Daily Show from YouTube NOT from the TV. YouTube sent the kid to TV not the reverse.
She came home one weekend (needing laundry done, money, actual food, etc) and spent the better part of an hour showing me various clips off YouTube covering the Daily Show. She mentioned she now watches the show and when she can't, uses the slingbox I've set up here to "Tivo" the thing to watch later. Progress. And, more to the point, these are the habits of the (soon to be release from university) next generation consumer. Lots of em.
Back in the early nineties, I spent a bunch of time in Japan/Europe with Sony and Phillips working on a specification that would ultimately become the CD+ stuff you see today. Buy a Music CD, pop it in the car, it plays, bring it home, drop it in the PC, lots of cool stuff besides just the music. [RIP: Nicole Mitskog]
Sony and Phillips basically own all the patents in this space so if you wanted to do anything, you had to get them to agree. Great fun mixing the cultures. Sony guys would constantly take the Phillips guys out to fancy places to eat and ply them with whatever weird food they could come up with, while the Phillips guys tried to remain all European formal and polite. Then the Phillips guys would do it to the Sony guys when all of them had to meet in Europe. Battle of the barf bags, I liked to call it.
But I digress.
In a meeting where we lowly Microsoft people made a plea for some common standards to help our developers, I recall the immortal words of one executive at Sony:
"We understand your request and understand this notion of progress. We believe that we may not be able to stop progress, but we can certainly slow it up."
I think he got a job at either Comedy Central or the RIAA, not sure which.
Idiots. I made the same point as you recently (conoroneill.com/2006/09/23/why-cant-we-make-tv-like-this/) after I discovered The Daily Show (and Colbert) on YouTube. Not only is it good for the programme, it is also important for non-US TV stations who broadcast it and are trying to build their general viewing numbers (like More4 over in the UK).
Posted by: Conor O'Neill | October 28, 2006 at 12:52
Sony: the company that brought you such universal standards as Betamax, MiniDisc, and Memory Stick. :)
Posted by: Matt | October 29, 2006 at 20:46