Monday, May 25, 2009
Copyright Meets a New Worthy Foe: The Real-Time Web
Copyright law wasn’t written with today’s content consumption in mind.
Copyright law wasn’t written with today’s content consumption in mind.
Hollywood and the major record labels have always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with new media, alternating between roses and lawsuits for online entrepreneurs, if you will. Lately, it was looking a little like love was going to win. Hulu, after all, had convinced its detractors that even big dinosaurs can get things right, and record labels had started to embrace services like MySpace Music and Last.fm. But like an alcoholic who just can’t resist that drink, big media looks ready to relapse.
When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites. Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor. But with exclusivity deal ending soon, Hulu will have to see if it can defend the audience and brand it has built.
One way to think about online video is to consider how big a chunk it takes out of our daily lives. The amount of time U.S. Internet users spend watching video is up an impressive 40 percent year over year. Watchers tuned in for 273.1 minutes of online video in the month of November 2008, up from 195 minutes in November 2007, according to comScore.
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has posted an interesting description of his company’s long-term plans and prospects. YouTube’s (and Google’s) goal is to allow anyone to easily upload video to the ‘Net and make that content available on any device.
There is a lot of money being spent trying to turn internet video into something it’s not. It’s not TV. It’s certainly not going to be HDTV. What is shocking about the entire attempt to turn the internet into a TV/HDTV distribution medium is how much people lie to themselves about what is actually happening.
The numbers tell the story of the disconnect between online videos watched and online video ads sold: In December 2007, Americans watched 10 billion online videos, according to comScore. For the entire year of 2007, advertisers spent just $554 million on online video ads, according to Jupiter, while they spent $21 billion on all online ads.
It should come as no surprise: Incumbents are beginning to act like incumbents. But while the cable companies are the first ones to jump on the tiered broadband bandwagon, they won’t be the last. Their argument for limiting bandwidth and data transfers based on price sounds like a good idea, especially as a way to get bargain hunters to buy. In the long run, however, tiered broadband is a terrible idea that will bring the innovation inspired by flat-rate broadband to a screeching halt.
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