2006 White House Correspondents Dinner On Google Video
As usual, YouTube got itself in trouble over a hugely popular video last week, when C-SPAN complained about it featuring the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. Now, while YouTube is engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with its userbase, getting the number of infringing copies of the video down to a manageable number, but not eradicating it entirely, Google has gone ahead and made a deal so that its users can actually watch the video, legally.
The Google Video blog posts on how they’ve come to an agreement with C-SPAN to show the content, and agreement YouTube apparently failed (or never tried) to make. You have three options: You can watch the entire 1 hour, 35 minute video of the dinner, or stick to an 11 minute excerpt of President Bush and Bush impersonator Steve Bridges, or go for the 25 minute excerpt of Steven Colbert’s speech. Of course, if you want to enjoy Colbert’s biting remarks, make sure you quit about 16:45 in, because the press conference/chase segment is as tragically unfunny as it gets.
C-SPAN made sure that the video can’t be embedded in sites (else I would have done it), which seems like a bad idea. At least for the shorter segments, wouldn’t embedding help the video be more viral, and thus help C-SPAN sell more DVDs? The desire to sell the DVD explains away perfectly the decision to prevent downloading of the video, obviously, but C-SPAN could have considered selling the video through Google as well, saving them money on production costs.
Here’s what YouTube had to say:
But Julie Supan, senior director for marketing at YouTube, said officials there were stung by C-Span’s behavior because, she said, the site had helped fuel momentum for the Colbert clip.
“This was an exciting moment for them in a viral, random way,” she said. “To take it down from one site and (upload) on another–it is perplexing.”
She also noted that YouTube had tried to make a similar deal for the clip that Google Video eventually made. “Google will stop at nothing to try to win over the community,” she said.
YouTube has an inherent problem - they don’t review their content that goes up. It’s just automatic, which means that they can get all sorts of stuff that breaches copyright. Google Video, however, has some level of moderation. To try and solve their problem, I think YouTube over react, instantly jumping to remove any content that there is the suggestion around that it breaches copyright, whereas GVideo can calmly negotiate with content providers, in the full knowledge that it has complete control over what it hosts.
Comment by Huw | May 8, 2006