Viacom has been feuding with YouTube for almost a year now
over
various copyrighted clips of John Stewart that keep popping up on the
video sharing
site.
It even prompted the network to sue YouTube for $1 billion.
Now it is launching
a site dedicated to the show, which will offer more than
13,000 clips dating back to the very beginning.
I have to be honest: I’m not sure whether
Viacom’s new plan for The
Daily Show is a great idea or a really dumb idea (I’m also
leaving open
the possibility that it’s somewhere in between those two).
A Wikipedia Style Site
According to this
story
in the LA Times, Viacom has spent a lot of time tagging and identifying
clips so that they can be searched and aggregated by topic, guests,
etc. – and even plans to allow users to take part in the
cataloguing to
some extent, Wikipedia-style.
In the piece, the head of digital media
at Comedy Central thanks YouTube for jolting Viacom executives into
awareness:
“Without YouTube, he said, Viacom might not have
recognized the true value of the archives and dragged its feet in
digitally archiving and tagging” the clips.”
Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street
analyst” Blodget thinks Viacom’s move is
dumb.
He thinks the network should quit suing YouTube (which it says it is
still going ahead with) and upload all of its clips to the
site.
An Achievable Compromise?
Part
of me thinks that he’s right — why not make use of
the service that
everyone already associates with The Daily Show anyway? Plus it comes
with built-in Flash encoding, easy embedding, commenting tools, etc.
At the same time, however, YouTube has constraints. Clips tend
to be
short and poor quality, for example — and to a large extent
that’s what
users have come to expect.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to
do the kind of tagging and other things that Viacom is talking about,
and even if they could be done they might be wasted on an audience that
just wants to watch a funny clip.
I think (as my friend
Steve Bryant
at the Hollywood Reporter does) that in an ideal world Viacom would do
both: upload short clips to YouTube and let people embed them wherever
they want, and then have a much larger storehouse of longer clips and
entire shows at its own site.
These would all be tagged and catalogued, with added features
and
possibly even HD content to make it worth people’s effort to seek out.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
