Now I don’t mean “annoying” in the sense that I’m 100% loyal to YouTube, but rather the analogy it sort of presents – the neighbor that always has to outdo you in practically everything so that it looks like their “keeping up with the Jones’”.
Nevertheless, in case you’ve been living under a rock or had no media access for the past 24 hours, you probably heard/read/seen reports about how YouTube is in a little bit of trouble. Only a little?!? Well okay, maybe a lot…mostly from the massive $1 billion lawsuit that media giant, Viacom, issued against YouTube for copyright infringement — which seems to always be the case with anything going against YouTube.
In the most recent news since the lawsuit against the broadband video-sharing giant, NBC and News Corp. announced that they would begin development of a competitor to rival YouTube. Their strategy? By offering “premium web video content and broad scale distribution”, ad dollars will be driven to their new multi-partner media venture. Instead of just including amateur videos on their site like YouTube has, this new media venture from NBC and News Corp. (owner of FOX) will feature their own shows, such as “The Simpsons”, “30 Rock”, etc. and they’ll be full-featured. No 2-minute clips of an episode, but rather the full 30 minutes! The only disadvantage for most people is that some postings will be free, but others may require payment, but as iTunes has shown, people will pay a decent fee to watch their latest video and/or audio favorites.
According to a ClickZ.com article covering this story:
Despite YouTube’s dominance in the Web video space, presence of the new network on MySpace, Yahoo, AOL and MSN promises to give the new venture exposure to the bulk of online users. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, the top five Web brands with the highest number of unique visits and time spent on their sites in order were Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, [AOL] Time Warner and MySpace-owner News Corp. Online.
Wht’s YouTube got? A bigger search advantage with their partnership with Google?
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