Comedy Central & YouTube

I write a post about the dilemma faced by Comedy Central and Viacom executives on Thursday of last week (and what they should do about their clips up on YouTube now that’s it’s been bought by Google) and then  I read over the weekend YouTube is taking down Comedy Central clips on their site. I assume it’s all due to the power of this blog…

As I wrote in the last post, the game has changed now that Google has bought YouTube, and folks at places like ComedyCentral are ensuring their future impotence if they allow GooTube to become the  place to find all video on the Internet (again, Google bought YouTube because it is the current defacto place to search for video).  As much as they’ll be portrayed as villains or idiots  (or both) for forcing YouTube to take down their clips, this is clearly the right strategic move.

But getting their stuff off YouTube isn’t sufficient. What they now need to do, quickly and urgently, is get those clips up on the Comedy Central site. Allow their users to post the clips there. Allow them to embed them into their blogs, MySpace pages, and so on. Give them a better service with higher quality than they got on YouTube. In essence, match the stick (pulling down clips on YouTube) with the carrot (getting the videos up on Comedy Central). Comedy Central should send a message to as many of the folks who posted the videos on YouTube, and invite them to upload the videos to ComedyCentrals video sharing platform (if they haven’t built it yet, they had better do so soon).

If Comedy Central doesn’t do this, doesn’t give their audience what they want on a site they own and control, then they’ll just be playing a game of whack-a-mole. The clips will come down YouTube, but they’ll show up somewhere else, and we’ll all migrate to that new place to get our time-and-place-shifted Comedy Central fix.

Online Video Geopolitics, Part 2

Now that Google has bought YouTube, what do you do if you’re an executive in the new media division of, say, Viacom? Or NBC? Do you partner with Google? Do you roll your own service? Do you sue them? Some combination of all three?

In the past year, whenever a media rights owner has protested their stuff was up on YouTube, they would invariably be met with a chorus of blogger-know-it-alls (hey, I might have even jumped in!) telling them they were 20th century dinosaurs, that they should let their stuff flow freely over YouTube, get over their issues, enjoy the free exposure, and join us right-thinking Web 2.0 people. That may have made sense when YouTube was a scrappy, independent start up.

But does it make sense now? Now that Google owns them? Is doing a license deal with GooTube basically ensuring you’ll have the same dependency on them in 5 years that we have on the Middle East (and Venezuela!) for oil?

Maybe. Consider this quote from Chad Hurley earlier in the summer:

I think we’re in a good position because we have created a marketplace for video and it is this this natural network effect that we’ve created where we have the most content becuase we have the largest audience and that’s going to keep continue to drive each other. (emphasis is mine)

Both sides, both the content coming in and and the audience we’re creating. And it’s very similar again to the eBay issue where they had an auction product that gained critical mass. Yahoo! came by and started creating their own technology, potentially better technology, but they didn’t have the consumers there to pull it off. So we feel we’re potentially in the same position with our video site.

I think this claim, that YouTube has built a network effect like eBay’s, is harder to unravel than it seems on the surface. I’ve thought about it a lot, and am not sure Hurley’s right. There are reasons why true peer-to-peer marketplaces like eBay tend to generate centralized, easy-to-defend network effects; I’d argue YouTube is not really such a marketplace.

 

 

Instead, what I do think has happened is that YouTube is now the defacto place to search for video, and has built a temporary network effect around that phenomenon. The reason this has occured is because (a) the stupid way we’ve architected video on the Internet to date makes it hard to search for files and play them back easily, and (b) YouTube’s users have the most definitive library of video clips ever created. Some of it, uh, not really legally licensed.

 

 

To illustrate: try searching for Daily Show clips on the Internet with Google, and then repeat on YouTube. It’s clear which is better. I am now trained to look for the latest DailyShow clips (and almost every other type of video I can think of) on YouTube. I think that’s why Google bought YouTube, by the way. Not just for the so-called eyeball traffic.

 

 

That GooTube is in a position to own video search is a very dangerous thing for media companies and rights holders.  If GooTube is able to maintain their position and build upon it, if “a” above doesn’t get solved and “b” continues, GooTube becomes the Internet version of Comcast, but with 80% homes passed, not 20%. It becomes the one company you have to do a deal with if you want your content seen (because everyone is going there to find video, because general search on the Internet doesn’t work).

 

So, if you’re the head of MTV New Media, do you go and license all your content to GooTube now, helping them to cement their position as the one place to go for video online, and ensuring your future subservience to them? Doesn’t seem like the smart move to me.

 

 

I don’t think suing helps, either, by the way. Although I’m sure that will be a strategy for some (you can see people licking their chops to get some Google cash). I think the better strategy is to compete. It’s not that hard to build a great sharing site like YouTube’s. Go do that if you’re MTV.

 

 

If Comedy Central had a site that was as easy and fun to use as YouTube’s, where I could find a great stash of Daily Show and Colbert clips, where I could embed them in my blog or get the latest clips delivered via RSS, I’d be happy. I’d be even happier if I could get a high quality version of the clips — I’d probably be willing to subscribe — that I could download without DRM.

 

 

The great danger for GooTube is that their temporary network effect will go away if their library is diminished. The vaunted network effect of the old Napster amounted to very little when the music was taken away. Same with GooTube. If they have to start taking down lots and lots of clips from the service, their position as the place to search is diminished. If people like MTV and Comedy Central really compete, and offer compelling services with their programming (and indeed, MTV has started with their beta iFilm service), and quit hiding the clips behind javascript so they can’t be properly indexed and searched, that will also hurt GooTube (but will help Google!).

 

 

So, I think the answer to the question I asked at the top is: don’t do a deal with GooTube (or do a very, very limited deal); ask them to remove the unlicensed stuff you own from their service; but don’t do that until and unless you’re able to offer a video service that is just as good as YouTube’s, if not better. Either your own, or through a partner.

Delayed Reaction to Google-YouTube

I’ve been mulling the Goog-YouTube acquisition the past week and wanted to share some thoughts.

First off, it’s impressive to see GOOG effectively admit their own video product wasn’t going to succeed. That’s a hard and difficult thing for companies to do.

Second, the “Google is an engineering-driven company” meme is now dead. If it were such a company, GOOG would have done what Microsoft has done — sit on the sidelines, and proclaim building it is cheaper than buying it. Instead, Google saw a big, fat inventory-rich service, swallowed its collective pride, and snapped it up (conveniently blocking Yahoo and MSN from encroaching on their dominance of the Internet advertising space at the same time).

But what’s really struck me about the acquisition is that it so perfectly captures this moment and time in our business, and that this particular moment is so full of ironies. We’ve come full circle to a point we last reached in, say, 1998 or 1999, where acquisitions are not driven and dictated by quaint notions of math and value, but are instead about showing you have momentum and are a dynamic player.

To dicker over price (as Yahoo! appears to have done) proves you lack momentum and dynamism. To question the value and actual worth of YouTube, as Mark Cuban has done repeatedly, is to stand up and declare yourself a heretic and and an idiot and irrelevant all at once.

Of course, maybe those two parties know something we’ve all forgotten (or perhaps that some younger folks never knew). The last multi-billion dollar acquisition of a video-focused service was, of course, when Yahoo! snatched up Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com. And we all know what happened there.

I have no idea if this is a repeat or not. I have been damned impressed with how quickly YouTube built a strong brand name and loyalty from its users, and it’s clear to me it is far more valuable than Broadcast.com was in 1999. But I just spent the morning reading through the archived articles about the Yahoo-Broadcast.com acquisition, and the parallels are amazing; both deals resonate with analysis from the so-called experts trumpeting the (abstract) notions of “consolidation” and “momentum” and “rich new advertising opportunities.”

It’s our reaction to this that scares me. Our call for big players to do something big (which will probably drive Yahoo! to buy Facebook at a premium) just to prove they’re not sclerotic . Won’t it end up leading to tulip mania, again?

Why don’t we, instead, call this a “one off.” Face(book) it, the YouTube acquisition was a very risky play. And Google is pretty much the only party that could afford to take the risk. Whether it’ll end up as their broadcast.com or Geocities, well we’ll just have to wait and see.

Bounty of the Internet

This is the kind of blog I love to find, and the raison d’etre of the medium as far as I am concerned.

It’s called “Shoefiti” and dedicated to documenting — both in words from the collective community and on google maps in a great mash-up –  the urban phenomenon of shoes dangling over powerlines and telephone wires.

NB: I stumbled on this site after doing a Google search on “meaning of tennis shoes hanging on telephone wires.” It was result #1. Yeah, Google!

Of course, no definitive answer is provided (maybe, there isn’t just one?) but some fun urban legends recounted. Check it out.

GOOG Results, Ouch (It Was the Taxes)

I’ve done just a quick scan, and have taken a look at the after market trading (GOOG down 6% already since the bell, UPDATE now 12%), and the quarter doesn’t appear to have delivered on what the street wanted.

From my read, GOOG fell well short of EPS estimates (their GAAP $1.22/share, non-GAPP was $1.54, street was expecting $1.77 or so), and growth from Q3 was pretty shallow (relative to the seasonal blowout that I expect investors wanted and expected, given the share price).

This is not to say GOOG is going down the drain, or a bad company. It’s clearly the healthiest, best, most important Internet company right now. But it does seem to confirm my earlier suspicions they were worried about their growth, and that it wasn’t strong enough to meet the market’s incredible expectations given the share price.

I’ll tune into the conference call for kicks, this should make the folks over at Yahoo! feel a little better…

UPDATE: Listening into the call, and looking more closely at the results table (nice q-over-q presentation here) it’s clear that a whopper tax hit that they didn’t seem to foresee was the culprit behind non-GAAP EPS being off the mark by at almost $.20/share. But even without the tax hit, it’s clear that revenues and earnings would only have met, not exceeded, expectations, and that was not going to be enough to keep the stock flying in the mid-400s, with a P/E of over 90.

Overall, pretty positive presentation from the Google folks. Eric Schmidt and the CFO spent a lot of time talking about potential for the international market to fuel growth in the business. Having spent some time running an international consumer internet business (to be fair, one much, much, much smaller than Google’s) I, too, am bullish about growth.

But I’m not sure they should place too much faith there; they are already at 38% of total revenues for the int’l side, Google in Europe already has fantastic market share and can’t grow too much more, and there are many secular reasons why internet advertising is likely to remain smaller outside the United States for a while. After all, in “traditional media,” about half of all advertising spending is in the United States, mainly because so much of the worldwide consumer demand for products and services comes from United States consumers…

In the long term, Google is right to be bullish, but I think it will be a longer, harder slog than they are admitting.

It will be interesting, all-in-all, to see how the market digests all this news, that the tax hit was responsible for so much of the miss, but the fact too that they would just barely have met expectations even without the additional taxes, which in and of itself would have been a miss and a disappointment.

China, GYM, and Stephen Colbert

How do I lump these three things together? Truthiness. Let me explain.

I’ve been trying to figure out where I stand on Google’s entry into China (and have written about similar dilemnas and my personal experience in China here and here). My initial gut instinct was that Google was wrong to do this, particularly in light of their “do no evil” aspirations. But I found the very adult commentary from both Doc Searls and Dr. Weinberberger (whose writings I admire but neither of whom I know personally) on this topic compelling. So I thought about it some more.

Their position is also advanced today by Bill Gates.

The essential argument from Searls, Weinberger, Gates and probably Sergey Brin is this: the world is a messy place, we are continually faced with difficult moral dilemnas for which there are rarely perfectly moral answers, and on balance engagement with China is better than the alternatives. More specifically, both Gates and Brin would probably argue this particular form of engagement is likely to increase, not decrease, the amount and scope of information available to Chinese internet users.

But then there is this. The reality does not meet the rhetoric or our hopes. If you are in China, you still can’t search about Falun Gong, Tiannamen Square, Tibet or Taiwan with any hope of really getting something that is objectively close to the truth. Nor can you expect to write about those subjects truthfully. The government simply won’t allow that to happen. Indeed, Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all complied with the Chinese government’s request to ensure that you can’t do this. And other folks like Cisco have worked hard to help them built the Great Wall in case those guys don’t filter things out.

Which leads us to truthiness. With these types of bargains with folks like MSN, Yahoo and Google, the Chinese government can continue to argue and proclaim they are “liberalizing” and inreasing the openness of their society. And Yahoo!, Google and MSN can argue that they are not doing something immoral, or wrong, but that instead that they’re helping to open up China and Chinese society by “engaging.” They all — the Chinese government and GYM –
get to engage in some truthiness. The appeal and logic of “engagement”
seems and feels true — so long as you ignore the reality and the facts. The facts are that GYM are providing services and technology that help the Chinese government
restrict and repress free speech, especially political speech. Which makes this example of truthiness that much more delicious — because they all essentially argue that by abetting in repression in the short-term they’ll liberate in the long-run!

The world is complex and full of moral mixed outcomes, but there must remain things we won’t do — even for vast sums of money. As I’ve asked before, what would we make of now of IBM arguing that their engagement with Nazi Germany in the 1930s was proper? In this particular case, I am increasingly of the opinion that GYM and Cisco have crossed the line. But like Searls and Weinberger, I could be wrong.

Felten on Google Video

Ed Felten has an excellent post about the privacy implications of Google Video’s DRM solution. Very much worth a read. His conclusion echoes a point I made several months ago on my typepad blog about the Google flirting with disaster with their web accelerator product.

As Felten points out, the flaunting of privacy concerns probably isn’t intentional or deliberate. More likely, just hubris. I’ve seen that movie before.

DOJ v. Google, Why Is This Bothering Me?

Yesterday on this blog, I speculated that perhaps Google’s resistance to the DOJ subpoenas might produce market forces that create a virtuous cycle, where all of the major portals and search engines would try to outdo one another to demonstrate loyalty to us, the users, in opposing Big Brother-like snooping.

Reading through the materials more carefully, especially the letter from Google’s attorney (echoed by Battelle’s reaction and analysis), it would seem Google’s resistance is less predicated on principle and more on protection of proprietary information for competitive reasons. (Oops, I should have had my cyncicism barometer dialed up). And now I wonder whether market forces and actions will actually lead to the opposite end than the one I described.

In order to ensure they appear less trustworthy, will folks like Yahoo! and MSN and others try to soothe us with comfortable rhetoric, telling us no “privacy” rights are at stake, all the while giving up information to the government without a fight? One can see this spin already happening, to a degree. Just read yesterday’s Search Engine Watch play-by-play relaying the comments of Yahoo and MSN folks:

In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information –
and MSN which likely did the same — it is important to note that it is not just
spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I
explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any
personally identifiable data.

Let me especially stress this. Want 1 million random web sites? There’s no
privacy issue in that. The government didn’t ask for the “bad” sites or sites
that were linked with any particular activity. They just wanted a list of sites,
probably so they could do a survey.

It’s a stupid request, of course. It’s sort of like the government asking a major car
dealership to give you a list of random license plate numbers rather than the Department Of Motor Vehicles. Surely the
government can generate its own list without forcing a private company to do
this.

How about those search requests? They are a list of searches with no user
data associated with them. If that’s a user privacy issue, then live displays
such as listed
here are a long-standing one.

Here’s a better example. Infospace — which owns the Dogpile meta search
engine — has sold raw search data to
Wordtracker for years. I have never heard of anyone concerned about the
privacy implications in that. This is because there aren’t any. You can’t see
who did a search, IP addresses, cookies, etc. It’s just a big long list of
words.

That all sounds so reasonable, but the more I thought about it the more it troubled me. I *get* that asking for aggregated queries without personally identifiable information doesn’t violate anyone’s individual privacy. But isn’t the government’s request for this information insidious? The DOJ wants to know what we’re searching for in order to restrict us from searching for those things. Doesn’t that bother you?

I keep trying to think up analogies or hypotheticals that would illustrate the moral risk more clearly. Here’s one:

Imagine a small town in, say, Utah where the city council passes a law restricting minors from getting access to books about homosexual sex practices in libraries or bookstores. Someone challenges the law, claiming among other things that minors rarely if ever check out these books. Lawyers for the city, to prove otherwise, subpoena all of library records for a 3 month period, plus purchase records from both online and brick-and-mortar bookstores serving the town’s citizenry, to show how often such books are checked-out or purchased, but with protections to ensure no personal information is associated with the data.

That kind of effort by a government body, to get access to information about information we collectively want and consume precisely in order to restrict consumption of certain materials would trouble me. Hugely. Which is why there has been such discussion about the Patriot Act with regard to library records.

Smarter, better informed minds than mine will parse this all more carefully I hope. But, I think the essential issue at stake is the government’s attempts to gain information about the information we consume, with the further intent to restrict or regulate the information we consume. That’s a bad thing, plain and simple.

Corporations as Rights Guarantors?

Interesting discussion all over the web today about the Government’s anti-pornography crusade and related demand for information from Google by the DOJ.

Further, interesting speculation on Search Engine Watch that MSN and Yahoo complied, at least to a limited extent, with the government’s request.

I think Google’s position is commendable. Their non-compliance will only bolster their “good Google” image. Conversely, it’s possible that if people pay attention to this and it turns into a bigger issue, MSN and Yahoo! will suffer in the minds of some consumers — even though it appears they released no “personal” information.

Both Yahoo and MSN are already tainted, in that they have collaborated with the Chinese government’s efforts to repress political speech. This latest incident reinforces the impression that they’d not put up much of a fight with any government when it comes to information they may have about us users, both in the collective and individual sense.

Ironically, maybe eventually interestingly, this could create a competitive dynamic that is helpful. If Google is consistent in its apparent protection of its users, it should consistently gain loyalty from us (that, of course, requires a big and as of yet unproven assumption: that we collectively actually care about our rights). If Yahoo! and MSN continue to suffer by comparison, they may do more. One way to highlight their efforts will be to pick high profile, important fights with various governments to protect their users rights.

Newspapers, and some other media companies, have long done this, both to advance reportorial privileges, but also because they know it’s good marketing. When they fight government subpoenas, they look like they’re fighting for the little guy, against the big bad government. (One could argue that at least that used to be the case, with respect to things like the Pentagon Papers).

In this age of increasingly bold uses of executive power, including admitted wiretapping and monitoring of US citizens conversations without a warrant and in defiance of the law, could corporations like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN end up being a key wall of protection against unwanted and unwarranted attempts to snoop on us? All incented by competition to be the best “protector” of our online rights?

It’s frightening that it could come to this. I’m glad to see corporations act righteously, as Google appears to have done here. But I don’t want to have to rely on the power of market forces and profit incentives to secure our fundamental constitutional rights.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Internet, Spying

Google Video Loses the Plot

First: I have to caveat everything I write here because I haven’t been able to look at or use Google Video yet. That the service was announced, but not launched, is in and of itself lame.

Second, based on what I’ve been able to learn about Google video, it would seem they have not really done anything useful. Instead, they appear to have picked a strategy that adds to the tower of Babel that is the downloadable video internet marketplace today.

What should they have done? Simple, same video marketplace idea, but without a DRM solution. Give us paid-for content, but in a more-or-less standard wrapper — MPEG4 or the H.264 flavor, that works on the largest variety of devices and that can be burned to DVD without restriction.

I would guess Google will argue that they are doing that (the Charlie Rose example that has been cited), but that they’re also want to offer media companies and producers a choice between that approach or some form of DRM distribution. Indeed, here is their pitch:

Owners also have the choice to offer their content with
or without copy protection – enabling them greater control over its
distribution.

Sure, it sound sensible and logical. But, by giving this choice they’ve made a real mistake, because they have forfeited the market-making impact they could have had, and their opportunity to build a video marketplace that actually provides consumers a decent experience. Most media companies and producers offering paid-for content will choose to have their content copy-protected, and unless I’m missing something, that copy protection probably won’t work with a significant range of devices (and I doubt it will provide for DVD-burning, so sneakernet won’t be an option, either).

So what Google has ended up with is a second-rate (at best) initial content offering and a third-class consumer experience. With a little bravery, they could have focused on a first-rate consumer experience — and a solution without DRM is the only consumer-friendly option for now. Combining first class consumer experience with their market-making traffic would have made Google a real threat. Indeed, with that combination, they would need just one success — one — to get the ball rolling. One example of a video selling 1 million, 2 million, or 3 million copies, and they’d have folks beating down their door. And without a connected device strategy (like Apple), it would be a lot easier to sell that many copies of a video if it could be burned to DVD; or copied to a Tivo; or to an iPod.

PS: my support for a non-DRM solution isn’t borne out of some anti-copyright agenda. It’s just a practical view, outlined here.