In another move to strengthen the anti-YouTube coalition, Viacom is syndicating its videos (from Comedy Central, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Atom Films, among other properties) to a whole new slew of video-sharing Websites. The new recipients of Viacom’s video love are Dailymotion, Veoh (which already has Hulu and CBS videos), imeem, GoFish, and MeeVee. They join AOL, Bebo, Joost, MSN, and Comcast’s Fancast in gaining access to Viacom’s video library.
Viacom obviously wants to strengthen the hand of other video Websites against Youtube by spreading its videos everywhere except on YouTube. Viacom has a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement and yanked its videos from the site last year. As Comedy Central’s own Jon Stewart said last night regarding his parent company’s lawsuit against YouTube, “A billion dollars? What are they four-year olds?”
I’ve embedded the clip below (which is mostly about the Hollywood writer’s strike) from The Daily Show’s Website. The comment is about four minutes in:
I just tried out FanCast and have to say I will go there instead of Hulu.com, as they have Hulu stuff and CBS stuff.
Now with Viacom doing this what’s the point of Joost?
it’s a shame hulu isn’t the place aggregating all this content. I think they really have the best player and experience of anyone out there (especially the ability to create your own sharable/embeddable clips).
I love John Stewart for this very reason. Glad to see you got a clip, I was waiting anxiously for someone to post about it.
Viacom sucks and Stewart is right. At the end Greedy Viacom will meet failures in its strategy
Brightcove distribute Viacoms content too…plus a whole host of others including British Sky Broadcasting, Sony BMG UK, Hachette Filipacchi UK, Emap and IPC Media.
Viacom is jealous of YouTube, now their case about copyright doesn’t make sense. I hope the judge makes Viacom pay.
Strategic Delusion #1812 / Treating the internet as a distribution platform
“A video destination is just really hard to differentiate,” said Verjee. “It’s really far away from a must-buy for an advertiser or a must-go-to for a consumer.” Verjee is not wrong. With mainstream video content it’s not just hard, it’s IMPOSSIBLE.
Every studio views the internet as just A N OTHER distribution platform, an inert pipe, where they can count up more eyeballs and sell or share more advertising. Networks/Broadcasters such as MTV distribute to anyone that asks, as long as they take the lions share of revenue. How do you differentiate when your competitors have the same content?
GoFish like many others are playing into the hands of today’s dominant players. This strategy does not pay off, the studios/labels will increase the take year after year until they bleed the market dry. Economically, this is no different than what’s happen
inged in the music business where people like Bolt and very recently Pandora [UK] have given up because of trouble licensing music for distribution. It just becomes too expensive and unviable.If you want to differentiate, if you want to have a dominant strategy, you have to start again, build from the ground up and rearchitect the value system. It isn’t easy. You need a revolutionary mindset. You need to reinvent TV.
This means revisiting how video is conceived, produced, delivered and experienced by viewers. From an advertising perspective it means reinventing TV marketing altogether. Advertising can no longer mean, “distribute content bundled with ads to its network partners”. Oh let’s just “bundle” some pre-roll, post-roll, mid-roll, banner ads. This adds ZERO value to the viewer experience, in fact it is detrimental, check out the negative comments on Joost’s Forum re: advertising.
We can’t build on the decaying foundations of the current TV business. There are a bunch of very clever writers striking in Hollywood who could really help shape this, they’ve been trying to advance the video experience for years but have always been stifled by the paymasters [networks].