Upload Sites Get a Reality Dose
Posted on February 12, 2007
Filed Under Channels and Content, Commercial Trends |
The difficulty for those of us commenting on the future of entertainment has been that YouTube moment. Not just the 1.6 billion dollars but the very fact of a one year old company growing so fast, becoming so popular and winning loyal adherents in generation fickle. There are VCs slavering across the globe right now and turning down perfectly viable projects because they don’t have the YouTube factor. But YouTube and video uploading in general is getting a daily dose of reality.
Universal music has been hunting down videos that make use of its music. Reports the New York Times; Universal, the country’s largest music label, is in the final stages of negotiating a settlement with Bolt.com, an online community that it sued last November over copyright infringement. Bolt has agreed to admit that the uploads were a violation of Universal’s copyrights and to pay a settlement valued at several million dollars.
We’ve been naive in thinking that big royalty collectors like Universal would not go in pursuit of violators and we’ve been naive too I think in imagining that there are new business principles that the old guard ignore at their peril. Truth is the Universals are not dinosaurs at all but just hard headed. And who wouldn’t be? Unbelievably, to me, Europe’s major telco operators are still in business and prospering despite a ten year death knell.
The second event after YouTube is the growing censorhsip pattern in new media circles. YouTube recently banned a video by an athiest commentator Nick Gisburn because it seemed to show the Koran in a negative light. Gisburn, Shashdot reports had been making anti-Christian arguments previously but had his material withdrawn when he turned his attention to Islam. Google, YouTube’s owner, has also been accused from time to time of removing “controversial” posts from its search index.
The major benefit of the web is the apparent lack of censorship and the more we hear of these events the less credible the whole becomes as a source of “free”, ie liberated, information. Anybody that’s been around the media businesses for any length of time will probably say: it had to happen sooner or later. Media is about censorship. It is in Jerry McGuire’s words “what we do”. The judicious balancing of what you want to say with what can be said, the use of literary technique to disguise criticism but still say things, these are all part of the art.
Comments
5 Responses to “Upload Sites Get a Reality Dose”
Leave a Reply
“We’ve been niaive in thinking that big royalty collectors like Universal would not go in pursuit of violators and we’ve been niaive too I think in imagining that there are new business principles that the old guard ignore at their peril. Truth is the Universals are not dinosaurs at all but just hard headed. And who wouldn’t be?”
I believe it’s actually that a) they’re hard-headed and b) new business models aren’t actually that easy to develop (note that when interviewed, someone from Pirate Bay said it was their *job* to break the System and someone else’s to figure out how to make one that’s unbreakable… while meanwhile Pirate Bay collects ad revenue from their *cough* selfless *cough* activities).
As we move towards Reputation systems and Experience-as-product, and consumer-generated content resulting from lower-cost tools, the opportunities for corporations appear to diminish. If true (and I’ve not seen many options besides playing the advertising card… which won’t help when tangible goods become similarly vulnerable), then if/when that occurs, the risk involved in developing many of their properties increases. And whether born by shareholders or private investors, it’s an uncomfortable situation. Making a movie - of the kind people today typically enjoy - is, as I’m sure you’re aware, a significant endeavor often employing a large number of people. And as in manufacturing, labor - especially highly-trained labor - is a huge expense. In a no-holds-barred world, would a movie like LOTR have ever been made? I have my doubts. “Heaven’s Gate” scenarios will likely become increasingly common, even though we can expect big media to statistically analyze consumer habits (including downloads) to death and then use that information - fed into some kind of risk-averse algorithm - to create pablum for the masses; extravagant but inherently no-risk content. Stuff that doesn’t challenge our collective imagination and which increasingly blends into all the other stuff until it all becomes background noise with the occasional *pop* of someone taking a risk now and then.
That kind of noise will, I believe, give rise to a new generation of Rocky Horror-style participatory events. Experiential. Just in the same way that musicians will imo leave the labels, offer their music for free online, and make their money on the road. The same way I’ve long-believed authors would auction off character names and engage in other direct-contact style, experiential involvement with readers that brings in the bread money. Writers like Doctorow can celebrate DRM-hacks and promote a different kind of control (Creative Commons license) while comfortably shielded behind the traditional consumer desire to read a dead tree manuscript, but that too will change, and probably soon; lucky for Doctorow he has the ad revenue from boingboing and, I assume, his speakering fees. Not all authors have such lucrative safety nets.
Sounds to me like we may have a variation of the Dark Ages coming. Without adequate mechanisms to protect their creations, how many authors, musicians, and filmmakers will go underground or simply give up? It’s already happening in some parts of the world. Look at Chinese software developers: they make a product specific to the needs of their consumers, and their own people - too selfish or still too communist to understand the consequences - “share” (e.g. replicate and distribute) it to the point where the businesses go under. How’s that for motivation? May as well stick us back to an age before the printing press, where everything was made by hand (and don’t think a variation of that won’t be an option in the years to come; just look at Etsy’s growth).
By all means the dinosaurs need to wake up to the realities of what’s happening, but so do the consumers. This sword cuts both ways.
“We’ve been niaive in thinking that big royalty collectors like Universal would not go in pursuit of violators and we’ve been niaive too I think in imagining that there are new business principles that the old guard ignore at their peril.”
Spell check is your friend…
It’s “naive”, not “niaive”. If you want to be a journalist you should pay attention to detail.
Wow - some arrogant tone. I use a blog so idon’t have to be so careful.
[…] Let’s start by talking about Google and Microsoft. There’s a new tool for analysing Adsense results (1, 2), while Google Search Appliance wins an award, Google Webmaster Blog opens up for comments - and is Google Documents a paradigm shift? In Microsoft land, people awe writing about upcoming MS-related events, programming for activation systems and wondering which hosters fully support asp.net. Away from the ‘big two’, new toys include a Wordpress tag cloud and a simple Flash login box. On the lighter side of things, Ken has an honest spammer while Justin has a bizarre law-related spam story. Away from the laptop, Nokia’s N70 causes problems and Top Gear gets into trouble. The Ireland-USA relationship is an interesting one; Intel’s new chip has an Irish dimension, some tech people have been lost to Silicon Valley - when they get there, they’ll find that tech stuff costs less. Roam4Free won’t have to worry about money if their VC process goes well; right now, they’re reading Guy Kawaski for tips. In the policy world, 3 hits its Comreg requirements ahead of time and Tom wonders about carbon neutral data centres. And finally, we have some interest in online video; a feature, some thoughts on copyright and other issues…and a link to one of the most talked-about Web 2.0 topics of the week, Michael Wesch’s video. | Save as PDF | Post to del.icio.us […]
[…] Upload Sites Get a Reality Dose » What Will You See Next The difficulty for those of us commenting on the future of entertainment has been that YouTube moment. Not just the 1.6 billion dollars but the very fact of a one year old company growing so fast […]