Viacom Lawsuit

Viacom's billion dollar lawsuit against Youtube's parent company Google started last month. It's pretty silly for a couple of reasons.

There is a reason Time picked the audience as their person of the year in 2006. That mirror cover thing was pretty dumb, but I think it was a pretty smart choice. User-submitted content is having a huge impact on what we see. Instead of reading newspapers, we read blogs for news. Instead of FM radio, we have webcasts and satellite radio with custom stations. People find out about new bands on MySpace. I don't read Wired magazine, I go to Wired.com. Instead of SNL, now you have just got to see this kid dancing badly on youtube, it is hilarious, "LOL."

Viacom's pissed that instead of watching their network's shows at their scheduled time over standard airwaves, people are taking advantage of the internet to find new ways to entertain themselves. I loveTthe Office, but I've never watched it on a Thursday night at 8 (seriously, I had to look that up in listings) I just rent the thing on DVD from Netflix. My friend Brandon just buys them on iTunes each week. My friend Spencer Tivos it. Some people even grab it off of a bitTorrent site (which I would love to dive into in a different essay) but the bottom line is this - it gets watched. How many people are using the internet in some way to find their favorite entertainment, whether it's text, video or audio, instead of getting in the old fashioned way? In the near future, more people are going to be watching their favorite shows over the internet than on standard air waves.

And that terrifies Viacom. It's outside the little box they built for themselves back in the before-internet days that was supposed to last forever and ever. Well someone lied and Viacom's scared and taking it out on Youtube. Idiots.

NBC is being much more enlightened. NBC wasn't doing so well a few years ago, but a year of taking chances and they're in much better shape. The first step was getting very, very good programming. Old tired concepts like "Overweight stand up comedian with surprisingly attractive house wife struggle to raise a family" isn't going to pull in ratings anymore. Partly, because it comes on once a week, at exactly one time and if you aren't in front of your TV for those next 30 minutes you missed it. Partly, because I can watch clips of this kid wiggling a lightsaber on Youtube and it is hilarious. And I can watch the lightsaber kid anytime I want, as many times as I want as long as I have an internet connection. So that's what you're going to have to compete with. The bar is high.

Also, NBC got a Youtube account. They started putting promos, sneak previews of Heroes on the internet for people to see. There are dozens of clips from The Office on Youtube, and they have millions of hits each. Since they can watch it anytime they want, as often as they want, it's a lot easier to find the show this way. Some people see this clip on the internet and it's their first exposure to the show. They see it, they like it and now they want to see the full episode, when does it come on? Some people saw the show and liked it so much the fans started putting up their favorite parts of The Office up there for other people to see. And people watch them. Now, pay very close attention: having seen these clips on the internet, people are becoming very interested in watching this show. This clip on Youtube, put up there by a fan? It's serving as an ad. And nobody at NBC had to lift a finger. It doesn't cost them a dime. It builds buzz for the show, whatever that means. They don't even have to arrange hosting for the thing, that's Youtube's problem.

And NBC couldn't be happier with that situation. Because they are graciously allowing fans of NBC's programs to advertise NBC's programs for them. NBC is doing much better this year, and I can't wait for season 2 of Heroes to start.

Viacom is being less enlightened. They've decided to clench every muscle they can and freak out about this because the ratings are down, because the ratings don't take into account how much money you could make if your shows were up for sale on DVD or affordably for sale on something like iTunes. I suspect a little of it is because nobody's looking at "ifilm.net," the Viacom approved source of all your MTV and Comedy Central clips. At first I thought there might be frustration because they paid for all this hosting and advertising to get their site going and nobody's looking at it, but they only started ifilm after the lawsuit started. It's nice of them to get their own site so I can see clips from the Daily Show, but it's only got clips from this summer on, and my favorite clip (Jon Stewart making fun of Ted Steven's Series of Tubes rant) isn't on there. It was on Youtube, it's not on ifilm. So I decide I like Youtube more.

Another nice aspect of Youtube is that you don't actually have to go to Youtube to see the clip. Youtube's perfectly fine with people embedding video clips into their own websites. Your favorite website could have a list of their favorite upcoming shows, and it's ultra-convenient for the web author to put a clip from the show on their site by just embedding the clip they got from Youtube. It helps build a sense of community, builds a relationship with the user and the site that Youtube is so open, and free with their material. It's another so many people use it. Ifilm doesn't allow it, so people can only put a link to the ifilm page. People are less likely to click on a text link than they are to stay on the same page and watch a video clip, so there's less people clicking on links to ifilm. It's not that ifilm is a bad site, it's that it's very hard to start a new community site when there's already a clear frontrunner in that category because there's already a strong community in place at the frontrunner.

You see, there's this communications law that the more people you have on a network contributing to it, the better the network is. The more stuff you have in your basket, the more valuable the basket is. Youtube has a much bigger audience already installed than ifilm, hence more people are going to keep going there because it's already much more valuable. If you try to introduce me to your site, I ask "does it have all my favorite clips from Youtube? No, well then why bother, I'm already using Youtube."

Viacom could've looked at the reality of what's happening outside their old-fashioned box, adapted to the trend, gotten a Youtube account and started hosting better looking, well organized clips of their shows, which again would've served as effective free advertising, but instead they've chosen to ignore the trend and do what companies were doing a decade ago before the first .com bubble burst: starting a site and praying to any god they can find that people are going to look at it.

Good luck with that. Lemme know how that turns out, but right now I'm going to look at this little Indian dwarf dancing to techno music.