Viacom, The Daily Show, Filters and Lawsuits
Viacom's going to try to pull off an impressive trick today: Though currently suing Google/YouTube for $1 billion worth of copyright infringement, the media company is unveiling its own archive of every Daily Show segment recorded since 1999. The site (not up as of this posting) is searchable by both date and topic. It's a Shangri La of Stewart. There's going to be a lot of discussion about the pros and cons of this maneuver, so let's just break it down here:
Cons:
- Viacom doesn't benefit from YouTube's massive traffic...
- ...and thus doesn't gain additional viewers it might have gained
- Viacom pays for streaming costs
- Viacom pays other overhead, such as maintenance, encoding costs, personnel, writers to write captions, etc.
- Viacom retains complete control of the product, and doesn't benefit from user mashups, remixes, blog embeds, etc.
Pros:
- Viacom retains complete control of the product (see Con #5, above). This allows Viacom to control presentation, which is the business they're accustomed to being in.
- Viacom also retains full in-house ad sales abilities, a further degree of control that will possibly deliver greater margins than YouTube ads (or allow Viacom to offer the ads as part of a package deal for advertisers mainly interested in TV).
- Viacom doesn't cede mindshare to YouTube.
- Viacom grows its own web presence, hopefully building the support structure for web-only shows and further creative possibilities.
What am I missing here? For my part, I think this is only a good move for Viacom. But it doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive proposition. The best of both worlds would be to seed YouTube with a percentage of those clips (using YouTube's new filter), and use them to draw traffic to Viacom's own web properties and TV shows. But for that, you need to settle a $1 billion lawsuit.
