YouTube losing its appeal
Google Blogoscoped talks about how YouTube may be losing its appeal after being bought by Google. It may be accurate but its nothing to do with who has bought it that will be the downfall of YouTube. The more YouTube starts to be aggressive against copyright infringers the more people will move away.
It is Google's responsibility to try and balance the desire of the user to view clips of films, football goals, news items, funny "oops" moments and whatever else that comes from copyrighted material but is considered in general society as being fair use, with the desire of big business to shut out their content for all but those who pay money.
For me a 30 secs highlight clip of a football (soccer) match is fair use since it is just showing a minimal amount compared to the original. Furthermore, it is more of an advert for the network that shows the original live. The same goes for a film clip or a music video.
As was the case with Napster, Kazaa and others, if a company puts obstacles in the way then people will just shift and move elsewhere. The only way to keep people in is to add value to a system whereby people are fearful of moving elsewhere due to the amount of effort required to transfer that value that has been added over time. The best case in this day and age is what Microsoft have done with Windows. Due to the amound of applications build for windows it is more or less impossible for many businesses to move to Linux or Mac due to the costs of finding alternative software or of rewriting in-house software.
I don't think that YouTube does this yet. Often if I see an embedded video on a site it takes an effort to discern which service the video comes from. For the publisher to change service is as easy as just uploading the video to a different provider.
One possible way of adding value is to provide functionality that no one else provides. This is getting more and more difficult. On the other hand, locking in the user is counter-productive as it drives away your users to more liberal sites.
I would recommend to Google to spend as much money as possible to try and convince the companies whose copyright is being infringed to place links/adverts next to the vidoes to an alternative service which has better quality and is provided much more immediately than the short clip.
By directly being the cause of sales will Google be able to keep both users and BigBadBusiness happy.
It is Google's responsibility to try and balance the desire of the user to view clips of films, football goals, news items, funny "oops" moments and whatever else that comes from copyrighted material but is considered in general society as being fair use, with the desire of big business to shut out their content for all but those who pay money.
For me a 30 secs highlight clip of a football (soccer) match is fair use since it is just showing a minimal amount compared to the original. Furthermore, it is more of an advert for the network that shows the original live. The same goes for a film clip or a music video.
As was the case with Napster, Kazaa and others, if a company puts obstacles in the way then people will just shift and move elsewhere. The only way to keep people in is to add value to a system whereby people are fearful of moving elsewhere due to the amount of effort required to transfer that value that has been added over time. The best case in this day and age is what Microsoft have done with Windows. Due to the amound of applications build for windows it is more or less impossible for many businesses to move to Linux or Mac due to the costs of finding alternative software or of rewriting in-house software.
I don't think that YouTube does this yet. Often if I see an embedded video on a site it takes an effort to discern which service the video comes from. For the publisher to change service is as easy as just uploading the video to a different provider.
One possible way of adding value is to provide functionality that no one else provides. This is getting more and more difficult. On the other hand, locking in the user is counter-productive as it drives away your users to more liberal sites.
I would recommend to Google to spend as much money as possible to try and convince the companies whose copyright is being infringed to place links/adverts next to the vidoes to an alternative service which has better quality and is provided much more immediately than the short clip.
By directly being the cause of sales will Google be able to keep both users and BigBadBusiness happy.
posted by Utills at
Monday, October 23, 2006
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