A source just tipped us on some interesting changes Google-owned YouTube has made that give its partners more control over the blocking of video content they upload to the service.
Basically, there are two new buttons in the interface for partners. One says ‘Block by Country’ and provides content partners with the ability to geo-block a single video rather than an entire account, an oft-requested feature that allows partners to restrict the geographical rights for specific videos. This can be helpful for blocking a clip in a region where it might be culturally offensive or where rights issues prevent an account for having distribution rights in a handful of countries.
The second button reads ‘Enable Auto Block outside Ownership’ (yes, that’s a confusing name). The purpose of the button is similar to the first button, but is for content owners who only have rights to a video in a single region. Using this feature they can quickly claim rights to that one region, while automatically blocking access everywhere else.
We reached out to YouTube, who says that the new features “are another way that the site is looking to give partners more control over where their videos are viewed”.
wow, thats a cool feature. auto blocking duplicates. Youtube arbitrageurs should start worrying
they still need a way where you can request to use peoples content….
This is a really useful feature for intellectual property owners, however partially how many of these videos become so popular is by duplication including commentary and the occasional remixing of conent for other purposes.
I’m sure this mostly has to do with ad sponsored videos to make sure that the correct target audince viewing is maximized.
Way to go Youtube, definitely a great feature for original content provide!
Its really a good feature..
‘Blocking by country’ is the worse idea i’ve ever heard. everyone’s equal in this world, and everyone deserves the same quality and same content that us americans have…
Really you have to look at it from the perspective of the uploader, not the viewer. Say, for example, they upload a piece of content and it gets globally featured. In most cases of being featured, a lot of “haters” and “trolls” appear out of nowhere to abuse the video and its owner in the comments section.
If the original uploader doesn’t want to see this kind of ongoing abuse and spots a trend in where most of the users are from, for example America (hypothetically speaking, since it’s the largest developed internet-using country), they can just go ahead and block the video from sight in that country instead of going through the slow process of blocking individual users. As a YouTube partner myself I think it’s a brilliant feature.
That’s the worst excuse for this dumb feature I think anybody could come up with. You might be shocked by this but not everybody who lives in the same country is a carbon copy of each other. Believe it or not but there very well may be different people with different tastes all living, OMG, within the same borders. So it seems rather idiotic to ban everybody in a country from watching a video cause a few kids called the video lame.
But now, in a sense, you are discriminating all people in America… Not all of the viewers from America can be represented by that group of haters and trolls.
I think this is a terrible precedent that YouTube is setting… video is really the only type of content that we treat this way and it tugs at the fabric of the net. Imagine if you had to live inside the United States (or New York City) to read a NYTimes.com article, or that you had to live in Russia to access certain Russian bloggers.
This type of control may seem warranted for people who have put time and energy into creating a video. However, it fundamentally changes how we use and collectively understand the internet. Poverty of information and media is not what makes the internet a rich place; this special treatment of video will ultimately be detrimental to our collective (global) culture.
New York City isn’t in the United States?
you misread the comment
Re-uploading videos is often a common tactic blog owners do.
They don’t always know if the original video will not be taken down, embeds disabled on it later, or country restricted, so they will often repost the video (without consent) to prevent their embeds from dieing.
I see this pushing repeat videos getting a lot of posts on the other video sites to get around this issue.
glad they’ve made it easier outside the CMS. this would have been helpful when we put out our google wave pulp fiction video which one re-uploader got to the front of digg instead of our original.
ContentID is bad enough.
I really want to find out how the auto block feature works. This could be really bad for instances of parody, citation, etc…
What a terrible feature and only highlights that content producers still haven gotten it. This delusional attempt to impose artificial scarcity will only result in content being posted elsewhere to avoid the “network damage” inflicted by this new “feature”.
I’m disappointed Google/Youtube is bending over to placate those who would seek to cripple the internet in order to provide a crutch for their broken 20th century business models. Thankfully dinosaurs do eventually die.
Only for partners? Not for all uploaders?
Sorry people, but it is pretty dumb. Why?
People can use a PROXY(AKA Packet redirection from different server that is in other country.)
Orrr…. someone in the other country download the stream and then redistribute it.
Then again… learn how the internet works… -_-