YouTube Does Deal With NBC, e-Street Cred Increased All Around
Published June 28, 2006
Everyone I know seems to hate the term "web 2.0."
Some get this funny scrunched up look when they hear it, akin to the look my step-father took on during my wedding's late hour when my old friend, Frank, acceded to raucous pleas to "do" Frank the Tank of Old School fame.
In any event, web 2.0 is becoming a useful and ubiquitous way to relate just how different everything is now as compared to the last period of "good times" (aka web 1.0) and explosive technology and Internet-related growth.
I was reminded again — and this happens about 334 times a day these days — of the significance of the web 2.0 world we’re all living in when I read in Paid Content (a web 2.0 publication if there ever was one, piped to me directly and automatical-like via web 2.0 RSS feed) that NBC is working together with popular online video site YouTube to install legal promotional clips to hype up its fall television lineup. In return, NBC will run ads for YouTube online and on television.
To put this in perspective, this maneuver is something akin to Universal going to Napster in 1999 and saying, "We want to do a cross-promotional thing, cool?"
What remains to be seen is how NBC and other large-scale content producers will deal with "illegal" clips – such as Saturday Night Live sketches – circulating on YouTube and then accelerating across a galaxy of MySpace profiles via widgets.
Nonetheless, the NBC-YouTube deal is yet more proof that traditional media (web negative 3.0?) now needs online media in order to thrive and, perhaps very soon, survive at all. YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, talking to The Washington Post, underscores this by saying, "It's a clear proof point that we're building a viable, long-term business, and it's showing there's common ground between traditional and new media."
And this is just the beginning of a wave of "deals" that tie together and blend the ways in which we find and consume media. For example, Warner Bros. Entertainment announced this week that it will sell full-length films and TV shows by smaller online video player Guba.
I applaud NBC's move. It will be the forward-thinking media companies, those that accept that content must be "let go" in order to bring audience back, that understand that the media landscape is fractured and will only continue to splinter endlessly and chaotically, who will be left standing when the web 3.0 dance party (sponsored by Google-MicroFox) begins.
Eric Berlin is the Executive Producer of Blogcritics.org and publisher of Online Media Cultist. He's also prone to referring to himself in the third person in author bios in an attempt to make it look like someone Less Important wrote it for him.
Contact: dumpsterbust@gmail.com
- YouTube Does Deal With NBC, e-Street Cred Increased All Around
- Published: June 28, 2006
- Type: News
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Culture: Media, Sci/Tech: Internet, Video: Film and TV Business, Video: Television
- Part of a feature: Online Media Cultist
- Writer: Eric Berlin
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Yep. I imagine a goodly chunk of YouTube's staff is devoted to pulling down content that could get them sued. It will be really interesting to see how big/powerful companies will deal with this phenomenon while at the same "getting into bed" with the very web platforms that see all of these illegal submissions.
This is probably why NBC brokered the deal. Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer kind of thing. If you can't beat'em, own them
In the not-too-distant future a YouTube will be buying an NBCU !
Warner Brothers makes a deal with bittorrent, NBC with YouTube ... it's a different world out there, all right!
Youtube is one of the most popular video sharing sites on the net. A year ago, co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were in between jobs, a pair of twentysomething geeks running up big credit card debts as they tooled around a garage trying to develop an easy way for people to share homemade videos on the Web.
Hurley says, "I do not want to work hard. I want to live a soft life. I want to sleep for three hours every afternoon. I do not want to stay awake the whole day so that I can get a few grand at the end of each month. That is why I choose to live off the net. I am too lazy to try and
survive in the real world. That is why I did not bother to hold down a job though my credit card debt soared. On the net things are handed to me. The idea of youtube came to me from a dinner party with a half-dozen friends in
the geratest city in the world San Francisco. It was January, 2005, and we couldnt figure out a good solution. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So we created a site and put in basic software.
"What I and Steve came up with is a Web site, now
called YouTube, that has become an Internet phenomenon. Show the honey and the bees will flock to it. We worked for about six hours each week for two months designing youtube. We had the idea to create a community around the video. Once that was done we knew that tons of millions of dollars would just flow into our laps after a buyour which we expect to happen very soon. We will not have to work hard. In the old economy you have to work really hard for a
lousy promotion which might give you a few more grand if your employer is very generous. On the net once you have the idea magic will happen. That is what happened at Paypal.
"The basic software that I and Chen designed allows people to post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. Now we are sitting at home on our arses waiting for a buyout. I expect to make at least 400 millon dollars personally. Content has been handed to us on a silver
platter. We do not have to slog hard to create content like a poorly paid online journalist who makes a lousy 450k each year. We do not have to experience daily financial pressure
because our site does not get enough readers.
"We have it easy. The reason why we never held a job for more than a year was because we felt that a rope was attached to out necks. We would have had to stay chained in an office with four walls. It is such a pain to get up and run for the sake of a few grand at the end of the month. the content that we offer is free. That is easy for us to that as we do not have to work to create it. Copyrighted work is there for our users to
copy and paste as that is work which we have the right to copy. Other content comes from common folk wanting to share stuff.
"Revenues will come from advertising. the net is a
click and eyeballs business. The clicks wil come from youtube's milllions of eyeballs that we have not worked for. It is unearned traffic. We do not
have to sweat and bleed for it. That is the privilege of poorly paid online journalists. I do not have to worry about losing my job as my content does not get get enough page views. I do not have to take the initiative about
my own life. I do not have to discipline myself. The millions of youtube.com visitors will ensure that this will never happen. I wake up at ten in the morning. I can simply focus on trying to build relationships with my tall, tough women friends in San Francisco. We hang out together. We work out together. We sleep in the afternoon together."
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So this would explain why my Al Gore on SNL clip I uploaded got removed.