Saturday, May 19, 2007

Saturday Morning Levity

Not sure how long this is going to be posted so enjoy it while you can. As I understand it (think I read it in the WSJ), NBC et. al. has a team of web surfers that scour YouTube for their material and then send a formal removal request to a team over at YouTube that takes it down. I've tried to link to various items before but they get pulled down quickly.

I'm not entirely sure why the production companies do this. It seems to me that whatever ad revenue YouTube generates from these clips is fair compensation for increasing the value of the properties owned by NBC. And NBC doesn't even have to invest in the technology to do the hosting. But what do I know? If NBC would make their stuff embeddable and host it from their own site, folks wouldn't need YouTube.

Anyway, the first half of this clip is the skit, second half is some nonsense not worth watching.

Whoopsa-daisy!
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3 comments:

Michael said...

I read something about this recently. It has something to do with the kind of contracts the networks have negotiated with YouTube. Some networks have negotiated for a nice piece of the ad revenue, others not so much. Plus YouTube is owned by Viacom and rival network CBS and if NBC can license their stuff to Itunes and get paid for it, that's the way they're gonna go. In the end it's all very confusing and frustratig to viewers and bloggers like us. :(

Big Daddy said...

Actually, NBC has a page of their shows on YouTube.

So does Universal Music Group.

I think they are slowly coming around.

michael sean morris said...

YouTube is such a phenom other content providers would be foolish not to follow suit. A clip on the 'Tube also constitutes Fair Use. No one benefits from it but the producers, since the work is long into profit and entirely promotional, now that everything is on DVD.

There's no reason good-quality scans of skits (like this one) and monologues can't be freely available, especially since they can't be downloaded.

I love Matt Foley, and I miss Chris Farley like crazy.