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Can Big Media Rule the Web?
The game is on. The media establishment will show Google, YouTube and brethren how to deliver video content properly, protected and profitably. Or get kicked in the pants while trying.
If nothing else, you’ve got to give NBC Universal and News Corp. credit for fighting in the marketplace, not in court.
They think their approach to serving consumers, copyright holders and advertisers with the “biggest video destination on the Web” can potentially outdo the popularity of YouTube, BitTorrent or Internet file-sharing ventures. And it comes when all big brands of established media are trying to figure out how to get a piece of the action on the World Wild Web.
For instance, sometime between now and the Fourth of July, videographers will begin uploading their own Blair Witch Projects and home-made slasher films to FEARnet, the online horror “channel” from Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator.
FEARnet in fact is already encouraging the making of films that impress even Quentin Tarantino with blood, gore and death, in conjunction with Ziddio, Comcast’s own YouTube-like video site.
How much viewer-created content will make its way onto the NewTube site from NBC U and News Corp. is not clear. Mashups are planned and viewer uploads will be accepted, but “content protection” is a basic plank of this venture.
So in the space of 10 days, Viacom now has sued Google for $1 billion over the thousands of clips of its shows that appear on YouTube, and NBC U and News Corp. go arm-in-arm to prove that there’s a better way of doing business than YouTube’s.
Up for grabs in the midst of the sturm and drang is creativity. Which model really spurs the most original thought? The bare-knuckle approach, where you take anything you can find, stitch it together or simply upload it straight up to the video site of your choice; or the protected gloves approach, where just about anything that goes on the Web should be governed by a commercial agreement?
Advocates for the free-for-all approach say the scale of the Internet has made it impossible so far to block the piracy of ideas that first occurred in music.
But it’s almost a mindset issue. If you make your mind up, you set in place systems that work.
At Current TV, the cable network founded by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, this has been part of the DNA from its start.
Online, it provides tutorials not just on how to tell stories, but how to respect copyrights. It even posts the forms a producer needs to get releases from people that appear in films and to get clearances to use original works of music.
Once a piece is created by a viewer, it’s reviewed first by a producer, then, a lawyer. Nothing goes on air or online unscrutinized.
Technology vets what goes on Viacom’s IFILM site. Soundtracks from copyrighted content are given digital fingerprints and stored in a database. When a user uploads a new clip, all parts of the audio track can be run past the database. Video frames will be fingerprinted, as well.
Sure, there are a few apples that will fall out of the basket. One Web site, Ars Technica, last week tweaked IFILM for the apparently unauthorized posting of a massive, multiplayer brawl that occurred in a New York Knicks basketball game in December.
But bang away at IFILM. Try to find the latest Jay Leno clip. Can’t be done. Try to find the latest Jon Stewart clip. That you might find. Viacom owns Comedy Central.
Now, established media can go too far for its own good. Click over to the Comcast site, Ziddio, and there’s no way to even try to find Leno or Stewart clips. There’s no search field to type a request into.
But the basic point is this: If you build a business based on sucking content from all breathing humans and can erect the server farms that let you store it and retransmit it, you can figure out – technically and humanly – how to protect copyright owners.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says technology to filter all content coming into YouTube is coming, but “it takes a while to roll this stuff out.” It’s funny how fast and technically smart Internet entrepreneurs can be when they’re figuring out how to make money; and how artfully slow they are once they start.
Now, NBC U and News Corp. get to prove, if they can, that doing video the “right way” not only matters creatively and legally, but in the only language that counts in the end.
Making money flow from it.
