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NBC has lost many battles over the past few years, but it looks as though it might actually win the war over its copy protected media. Executives from the company claim to have found a “template” for protecting their videos from piracy, and it appears as though it’s actually working. You may have noticed lately that copy protected content from NBC and others have been slowly drying up from video swapping sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh and even Soapbox. And as a result, NBC has been very vocal about the fact that it is generally satisfied with the new systems these services have put in place. As proof NBC cites its recent successes in controlling content from the both the Olympic Games and select Saturday Night Live clips. Clearly NBC views YouTube and other similar services as the primary battleground in protecting their content and attributes a large percentage of online video piracy to being committed out of convenience. According to Rick Cotton NBC’s general council; "What has happened up to now is the ability to access and download infringing content has been trivially simple, and the lesson it teaches people is that if it's that easy it can't be wrong,". NBC however seems to recognize that it needs to find alternatives to these services or risk pushing users to harder forms of piracy such as Bit Torrent. Arguably its full length episodes at both nbc.com and hulu.com do just that. Only time will tell if NBC’s main beef was truly over controlling its content, or simply locking it down to traditional distribution models.
Does the end of copy protected media on sites like YouTube put the death nail in user submitted video? Let us know what you think.
(Image Credit: www.nbc.com)
Comments are closed on this article
Shalbatana
September 29, 2008 at 11:21am
They would lose viewership if someone were to post a SNL video on youtube.
After all...only 10 minutes each week are actually funny.
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"There's no time like the future."
kc7wbq
September 29, 2008 at 9:39am
No, I doubt it. Youtube is doing a great job of not being stingy. They let you link a video hosted on their website to your website or blog. They pay the bandwidth, and in exchange they get to show free advertisements for other videos on your webpage. People love watching themselves, youtube isn't going anywhere.
hulu.com is awesome. I don't have a PVR, and I always feel quilty downloading something so I can watch it when I want to. With hulu I can watch The The Daily Show, full episodes of The Office and much much more when I want, where I want to. I was recently stuck at work until midnight on a Friday night and watch 2 episodes of Sons of Anarchy. Saved my life.
The ads on hulu are not abtrusive so far, and they always have a count down so you know how long they will be. As long as hulu doesn't get greedy and start adding tons of ads they will be very sucessful, IMHO. Are those few ads really paying the bandwidth costs?
