This just in from the LA Times:
News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends, according to people close to the negotiations.
The two companies enlisted help from some of Google’s biggest Internet rivals. The News Corp.-NBC Universal partnership has deals with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and News Corp.’s MySpace to place videos in front of their collective audience of hundreds of millions.
Paid Content gets props for early coverage.
If I have to choose between Murdoch ruling the world or Brin and Page, I’ll choose Brin and Page any day. It would be nice, though, to have a third option.
Traditional media is really bringing out the big guns against YouTube/Google. Murdoch plus NBC is a huge front, let alone TimeWarner, MS, and Yahoo, united in providing online videos via a new source. Wonder if their content will be more popular than the content that is user generated at YouTube. It is a major step in distribution for NewsCorp and NBC, but will it take off? Thanks for the heads-up John.
It’s weird that they emphasize the “Protected” aspect. Google has had DRMed video (including a payment backend) since launch. I think Viacom was even a customer (someone doing music videos was/is, anyway). Somehow I think they’re missing the point of YouTube if they think that what people really want is “professionally produced video in a rich consumer experience.” YouTube was popular because it wasn’t that–it was a way to quickly throw up a piece of video and embed a player in your blog or web page without all that other screen junk around it that big media insists on attaching to any of their content.
It’s the difference between: “LOL, Jon Stewart had a great joke last night, click here” and “Welcome to Comedy Central, a Viacom production, showing at … yada yada yada, and here are all our other shows, links to our wonderful sponsors, yada yada yada, please wait, buffering … buffering … but first a blurb about tonight’s lineup, buffering, buffering…”
Here is a great idea. Let this Blog come up with for a name for the new video site….
–> TVpc TV-PC PCtv
–> eTV
–> Intertaiment
–> StarTV
–> TVideo
=================================
Wouldn’t this be funny if the name was eventually fact taken from THIS blog ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺
This looks like another top-down corporate attempt to program the web.
I was involved in News Corp’s first failed web venture, iGuide (back in 1995), and that failed because it was also a top-down approach. All the big News Corp guns were brought to bear on the web, and couldn’t execute in that kind of environment. The upstarts like Excite (which I subsequently joined), Yahoo! and others showed that the web was a grass-roots medium — best navigated by start-ups than by corporates.
News Corp finally got this 10 years later when it acquired MySpace — buying the grass-roots success story rather than building it top-down. But now with this venture News Corp is going back to a top-down programming approach.
YouTube is another grass-roots success story — although we’ll see what happens after prolonged ownership by Google, which has grown now from the grass-roots into a large corporate and needs to act like one.
The real grass-roots content is the user-generated stuff posted on YouTube and this is what makes it successful. Users were drawn to YouTube because it was grass-roots like them — it shared the same values. This is what Google needs to try to maintain if it is to retain the loyalty of its YouTube users.
It will be very difficult for News Corp/NBC, or any big media player, to capture this essence and present themselves as the same kind of outlet. Without this, the service will perhaps at best be a cool place to source big media video content and use it for whatever purpose may be permitted.
Probably YouTube will lose a bit of its soul also as the big media players go after all of their copyrighted content and force YouTube to impose new restrictions on users, destroying the soul of the site as they bring it into compliance.
So what we are likely to be left with is a stripped-down and fully-vetted YouTube, and corporate alternatives such as News Corp/NBC. Until there is a solution to the copyright/fair use dilemma in user-generated content, it’s probably going to be a bleak few years for legal video sharing on the web.
Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski
SubHub
I vote for:
1 Goose.TV
2 Quack.COM
3 Kitche.net
“Wouldn’t this be funny if the name was eventually fact taken from THIS blog ☺”