Comedy Central Clips Removed from YouTube
Update 2: So I've spoken to a few people in the know, and this is what I think the situation is: Viacom basically directed Comedy Central to send a takedown notice. Comedy Central sent the notice for some shows, but the exact number of clips to be removed seems to be at YouTube's discretion. Meanwhile, Viacom continues to negotiate with Google. If that is indeed the full case at hand, then you have to wonder why Viacom didn't ask YouTube to remove all Comedy Central clips in their entirety. Could be because they're testing some metrics. I'm really not sure. All I know about Viacom chief Sumner Redstone's view of YouTube is that he thinks it's a good company.
Update: I've been going through YouTube looking for Comedy Central clips, and I've found plenty. I'm not sure what to make of this -- most of the clips seem to be older and under five minutes in length. I also notice that Daily Show and Colbert Report clips aren't listed on the most viewed pages as they usually are. I'll call Comedy Central tomorrow and find out what's up.
Here we go. Comedy Central has requested that YouTube remove all clips of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report from their site, according to this fella who uploaded clips. Try and access a Comedy Central show and this is what you get.
Does this mean the impending doom of YouTube? Not at all. Comedy Central has long benefited from the dual nature of the DMCA's safe harbor stipulations: The channel got the exposure it desired from the videos, but knew that it could stop the free ride whenever it wanted. Now that Comedy Central has enjoyed that exposure of YouTube, they're negotiating in public. I'm willing to bet in the next few weeks they'll partner with the video-sharing site.
Naysayers will say I'm wrong -- Comedy Central has their own broadband product, called Motherload. Won't they want to drive traffic there? Sure they will. But the online attention economy isn't a zero sum game. Ubiquity, as I've said before, is the new exclusivity. (thank you, Amanda Congdon.) And don't forget NBC did the same thing, although it took eight months between the time they removed Lazy Sunday from YouTube and then partnered with the site. Now Comedy Central is in the same position. By partnering with YouTube, they'll receive a cut of ad revenue and a lot of attention that they wouldn't get otherwise. I don't think Motherload streams 100 million videos per day, do you?
But before I go out on a prognostication limb (too late), it's worth noting that Comedy Central is owned by Viacom. MTV Networks, also a Viacom property, is currently testing video syndication with Google. Another former Viacom property, CBS, is partnered with YouTube.
So, since Google is about to finalize the YouTube acquisition, could this move by Comedy Central be related to the two companies' business arrangements? I don't know if that's the case. But if I was Sumner Redstone, I'd wonder why two business units were making money from a syndication deal (MTV and CBS) while another (Comedy Central) was giving away the goods for free.
It's 10:30 on a Friday night. Time to go to DBA for my buddy Mike's birthday. Let's revisit this tomorrow.
What about the political timing? A week before mid-terms, and with the Daily Show & Colbert having just taken a week off before hitting the road to produce some election-influencing programming...call me a conspiracist, but methinks there are other forces at work here besides Viacom’s greed.
Posted by: Hoochrunner | October 28, 2006 at 05:49 PM
There goes 25% of the videos. A few more like this, and the site could end up being actual consumer-generated media.
I hope it was the DBA in New Orleans.
Posted by: nalts | October 28, 2006 at 06:50 PM
Hmmm, interesting development and thanks for your analysis. I tend to agree with you that looks like Comedy Central, since it is also owned by Viacom like CBS, is just negotiating in public. What will be interesting is to see if there are any very popular 100,000+ views videos that gets *removed* by YouTube as per Comedy Central's DCMA request. For one thing, in my own analysis of the legal situation, I have always rely on the fact that even these broadcasters have "the legal power to take down", they have lost "the effective power to take down" because if they do that, they will get many people angry very fast.
In one of my long comment in another site, I went as far as drawing parallels of the broadcasters' "power to take down videos" to the "notwithstanding clause" (NWC) (see Wikipedia) in Canada's Charter of Rights and freedom. In short, the NWC lets Canadian provincial and federal governments to ignore all level of court decisions in some areas protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So the NWC is an extremely powerful legal tool. But the two recent attempted uses of the NWC have been disastrous for the provincial government that tried (namely Alberta), and basically the people (voters) complained so loudly that the provincial government backed off completely and didn't use the NWC at the end.
As a YouTube geek, I hope Comedy Central and YouTube will sort this out soon and stop this public posturing. As a legal geek, and as an experiment observer, I LOVE to see a ton of 100,000+ views Comedy Central clips get taken down from YouTube as per DCMA. I am still betting my Canadian Loonie (dollar) that if Comedy Central does that, it will hear complains so loudly and so quickly, they will be forced to reverse its decision just like the Alberta government.
By the way, IANAL (I am not a lawyer), and I do change my mind very often and very quickly.
Cheers,
Kempton
Posted by: Kempton | October 29, 2006 at 07:39 AM
To gather some hard data, I've created a simple blog entry "Comedy Central vs YouTubers - Progress tracking". Where I will track the search results of
# “Jon Stewart” (JS)
# “Colbert Report” (CR)
# “Comedy Central” (CC)
And here is my first search report.
Oct 29 21:00 MST & 22:18 MST update: searching JS returned 1283 results, CR returned 727 results, and CC returned 1656 results.
Posted by: Kempton | October 29, 2006 at 10:06 PM
Interesting. It would help if you had pre-takedown numbers to compare with, but that's a good start. I do wonder exactly how imperfect YouTube's takedown method is -- AFAIK, they don't have visual fingerprinting technology yet and have to rely on tags.
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