More than 100,000 clips are to be removed from Youtube

Posted on February 6th, 2007.

YouTube will never be like before anymore because Viacom had asked YouTube to remove all pirated clips from Viacom-owned television networks including MTV, Comedy Central, BET, TV Land and Nickelodeon. Viacom said that YouTube has violated the copyrights of their shows.

I am quite interested and totally agree with the statement from YouTube on this matter:

“It’s unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from YouTube’s passionate audience, which has helped to promote many of Viacom’s shows. We have received a DMCA takedown request from Viacom, and we will comply with their request,”

Viacom could manipulate the great community of YouTube to gain more audiences of their programmes. YouTube has a successful partnership with CBS in which CBS garnered 29.2 million views in the first month of operation in a YouTube channel.

Viacom also could be a little bit smarter by posting the clips themselves and put some little scrolling ads at the bottom of the video. Don’t they realize this potential of free advertising? Letting their videos spreading on the net will not affect their profit margin but it increases their popularity. Take a look at this statement from James McQuivey, an analyst with Forrester Research.

“On YouTube, if you watch a clip from The Colbert Report, you know he’s going to say something funny tomorrow and you might then go watch it tomorrow on Comedy Central. You don’t satisfy your urge by watching a two-minute clip. And I think Viacom knows that. They just want to be compensated for it. I don’t think they are against it; they just want to make sure they have a cut,” said McQuivey.

Argh, I will never see MTV video clips on YouTube anymore.

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