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Viacom Turns to Joost, Spurns YouTube
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Feb 20, 2007 10:55 AM
from the google-has-lost-please-turn-to-page-57 dept.
from the google-has-lost-please-turn-to-page-57 dept.
Vincenzo writes "Viacom has signed a deal with Joost that will see content from MTVI, Comedy Central, and CBS distributed on the new P2P distribution service. The move comes just two weeks after demanding YouTube pull over 100,000 videos offline. 'Joost's promise to protect their copyrights was a major factor in Viacom's decision, and also a stumbling block in their discussions with YouTube/Google. At the moment is it quite easy to download and store video content from YouTube, but no such exploit for Joost is known to exist.' It's also a 'secure' distribution medium in the eyes of many in the entertainment industry, since users can't upload content themselves.'"
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revilo78 writes "Will 2008 be the year we can finally drop our expensive cable bills? It's sure looking like it with Joost constantly adding content, ABC announcing it will stream shows in HD, and media boxes such as the Apple TV becoming popular. Television networks finally seem willing and ready to distribute their shows on the web, and hardware manufactures are finally making easy-to-use media boxes that will bring the web to the living room. Do you think we're finally there, the internet-based TV-on-demand we've all been wanting?"
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Great thinking guys (Score:5, Insightful)
The lack of executive foresight never ceases to amaze me. Did they ever consider that no exploits exist for Joost because:
1. Joost isn't yet available to the public at large. (You need to sign up for a beta.)
2. No one cares about Joost?
If Viacom signs a contract with Joost, the "security" of their distribution method will change in a hurry.
The amazing part is that a simple trip down the hall to the IT department would have told these executives this. It's just too bad that execs never trust their own technology staff. As far as they're concerned, we're just a bunch of whiners and worry-warts.
Besides, someone might save that 2 minute Craig Ferguson clip to their hard drive. OMG, OMG, OMG! The world will end! What will they do?!? (Shh! No one tell them about VCRs!)
That being said, I'm sure this move is actually more political than technical. Which only makes Viacoms position that much worse. Do they really want to cover over their political maneuvering by making themselves look uneducated?
From the Joost website:
And that would make us, YourJoost(TM)! Which you can watch on a tube. Sort of like a... YourTube(TM). Or something.
Who writes this stuff?
Re:Great thinking guys (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
the competition (Score:3, Informative)
sure, but where do I see money? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope, the distribution model is fucked. All
Re:sure, but where do I see money? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Wayne's World (Score:3, Funny)
You mean like that part in Wayne's World? [youtube.com]
-metric
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Eh...er... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't say the same thing for a 100,000 other actresses.
Time will tell if she gets paid well for her time.
Re:Great thinking guys (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it is probably ill-conceived, and the touted 'intellectual property' reasons are more secondary cover - than they are prime motivator.
Everyone is afraid of GOOG - telcos, TV and Cable channels, Hollywood and Microsoft. Watch them position and align to marginalize and even criminalize them. It is pretty pathetic. The 'content providers' especially. They want a 'pay at the gate' scenario, and will compromise/misunderstand every technology to get there.
Parent
Re:Great thinking guys (Score:5, Informative)
The video was below SD quality, but if it was greater I could have done multiple captures and stitched the frames together given enough overlap. You don't even need timecodes when you have jump cuts.
Parent
Re:Great thinking guys (Score:5, Insightful)
You're forgetting that their response was almost identical when VCRs first came out.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for trying to point that out, though.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Great thinking guys (Score:5, Insightful)
Mass media isn't so profitable if everyone can participate. That's what it's all about and that's what it's always been all about. Everything else is misdirection.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great thinking guys (Score:4, Funny)
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. See, they know it will be secure because no one cares about Joost. What better way to keep people from "stealing" your IP than to create a new service that is a clone of already popular and well-established services so that no one cares to use it? Genius, I tell ya.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
There's no known exploit 'cause nobody's cared (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough to make one. If there's content people want, they'll break joost too.
It's as if they never learn...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why bother?
This doesn't mean you won't get the same content on YouTube, exactly like you can today. It just makes an alternative source for one type of content, namely, music videos.
This doesn't even relieve Viacom of their burden under the DMCA to find and fire off a takedown to Google for each infringing video. They apparently have confused "we won't license this to you" with "people will stop uploading infringing material
1.65bn in stock later (Score:2)
Probably a lot of angry stock holders is my future bet.
I hope they have something big in the works because its sure a lot to pay for a site that is suddenly looking mighty bare.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1.65bn in stock later (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
because, y'know, google stockholders hate making money.
when google announced their intention to purchase YouTube (including the cost), GOOG was at about $426. by the time the acquisition closed, GOOG was a $489; most of that jump was in the two weeks after the announcement, around the middle of october - a period during which there was no other significant news. granted, things have slowed down a bit since then, but the trend still remains significantl
Is the smaller audience more beneficial? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still not sure why there is such a big deal about copyrighted video on YouTube. The advertising you get for your show being uploaded to the site is probably worth much more than the marginal lost you may have incurred from it being uploaded. I don't anyone is interested in archiving the lower quality flash video files from their site. Pirates will always get the shows from bittorent or other P2P services. The only thing I can think of is they are worried about loosing web traffic from each shows website. Why not cross link to the videos on YouTube from their websites?
The entertainment industry really needs to start getting creative. They need to learn to work with these new technologies and trends, rather than against them.
Re:Is the smaller audience more beneficial? (Score:5, Interesting)
Realisticly, it's an attempt by Viacom to place pressure on GooTube to do what they want. What they want is for Google to offer ultra-restrictive access to their... [my] precious... video content. Furthermore, they want Google to invent a foolproof copyright checker (as if such a thing is possible) to prevent average users from uploading Daily Show and Stephen Colbert clips. They're using the Joost deal as a bargaining chip to make Google do what they want.
In reality, this will end one of two ways:
1. Google will reply with a big, "So what?" and Viacom will only pay lip service to their Joost contract. A year down the road, Viacom will come back to YouTube with a cry of "me too!" when they notice how well the advertising is working for their competitors.
2. Google will appease Viacom with special features like: Prominent display of their content on the YouTube front page. Viacom will gruffly agree (when that's really one of the outcomes they were hoping for), but "only if you guys crack down harder on copyright violations!" Joost will get dropped like a rock.
Now if this was the Google of old, I'd say they will go with the first option. But given the slow progress of Google toward becoming Just Another Big Business(TM), I'd say it's just as likely that they'll take door #2.
Parent
another one sided distribution system (Score:2, Interesting)
although the summary focused on the "guarantee" of security joost represented for viacom, i think the one-sided distribution model is the big difference. i think, fundamentally, google's business plan revolves around letting end users become the content providers, and google just indexes all of the content -- they make it possible to navigate. this is a view orthogonal to what we're seeing with the media companies, of course. they want to create the content, own it, and control it. they don't want to se
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Something Lost (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That is why Vista is big on signed drivers and devices that compl
Re: (Score:2)
Seems pretty clear to me... to get get away from user creations that made YouTube popular and focus on something else that might make them popular. A different niche... like television length content. I wouldn't mind something like that. YouTube is fine for a quick clip of something funny, but I'd like to go to a place that had (legally) all the Saturday Night Live skits, or other TV content, some
The real story here (Score:4, Insightful)
Regardless of your position on the fair-use/control of content (by fair-use I mean being able to play content you legally on whatever device, etc. you wish), this statement smells of "monopolistic" activity. Unlawful activities do not start at users uploading content. They start with users uploading content they don't own (or even before that). The idea that an organization would believe it is appropriate to say a service is only 'secure' because we're the only ones who can submit content to it goes against everything that a free-market society believes. That one single quote does not say that users can't pirate content; rather, it says that we're the only organization with the rights to create and distribute our content.
In my opinion, that is the big story here. Not the decision to choose one delivery method over another.
What exactly is Joost's interest? (Score:2)
Re:What exactly is Joost's interest? (Score:4, Insightful)
IIRC, Joost is the diametric opposite of YouTube. The user experience in YouTube is P2P, but the technology is B2C. For Joost, the user experience is (I am guessing) B2C, but the technology is P2P.
Again , I don't know a lot about Joost (I'm not a TV watcher), but it sounds to me like something that would be attractive to content providers because it offers a familiar business model. It's like Joost is a cable network that delivers over the Internet.
Parent
Viacom != CBS (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I think CBS has the right idea with youtube; Short clips are a great way to advertise your TV shows, and also people will sit through 5-10 seconds ads in order to get the known quality of a specific uploader (i.e. CBS in this case). Right now, the only thing hurting them is that you can't do a youtube search limited to a specific user, and any random Joe can put "CBS" in his tags. I would expect google to fix that eventually.
Others will jump on the bandwagon when they
None of this is tangible in any way--all for PR (Score:2)
Ho-hum (Score:2)
it sounds like the usual crap (Score:4, Interesting)
So I've been waiting for IPTV. Technically, I don't understand why it would be so difficult to do. I mean, Comedy Central's Motherload already does it. Only crappily. You can't actualy get the full show, and the picture is *really* *really* small. But I guess there are other reasons that I may never fully understand. Though, in my naivate, I'm going to suggest greed as being on the top of the list.
And as the article pointed out, Youtube and Joost serve two different purposes. I mean, I guess it would be nice to get anything I wanted on Youtube, but the clips I've seen are never the full show, and once again, that is what I'd like. Watching short clips of a funny show just aggrevate me.
And so I'm actually excited about Joost. I mean, I still am not exactly sure how it will work, since the details seem to be a bit skimpy, but at least it has the potential. Then I skim over some of the shows that Viacom is releasing, and it all looks like crap. Especially since I don't see the Daily Show on their list. It's a 'will include' list, but that usually means what they don't list are only crappier crap.
Perhaps it's something as simple as them testing the market, and not wanting to release their 'prized possessions', but that seems stupid to me. The shows they have listed, I, nor do I suspect most people, care to see. So they'll run it for a while, claim low viewership, and end the program. And then they'll cite the stats as to why they'll never do anything with the interweb again. Assholes.
It's not that I think all their claims are invalid
It's not that it's impossible to come up with a new sales-model. They just have no interest in doing so.
IPTV is here (Score:3, Interesting)
Ignoring the player app (a typical Fl
Download and store video? (Score:3, Informative)
Sure there is. Its just not as direct as they are thinking. Since its digital media being displayed on screen, all ya gotta do is dump the video memory of the screen area where its displayed to disk. Instant saved video. There are numerous software packages out there to do this, some free, some not, but all designed specifically for this. Similar to using a tape recorder to record the music from the radio, or a camcorder to record a TV show, but in pure digital fashion, since its pulling the direct digital image from ram. Just another tech developed to fuel the pr0n industry, mostly used for people to record webcams ;)
Tm
"no such exploit is known to exist" (Score:2)
3... 2... 1...
(Also: "exploit", huh?)
It's amazing how none of you get it (Score:3, Insightful)
CopyFight is Good Business (Score:3, Interesting)
But more importantly, it puts copyrighted content into a YouTube competitor that can challenge YouTube if YouTube has the content. That means that YouTube's copyright enforcement doesn't happen in an vacuum of arbitrary claims and baseless decisions. When Joost complains, it will have a copy of the content and a copy of the contract with the content owner. The process to enforce copyright between the two corporations can take place in the well understood realm of corporate negotiations and lawsuits.
Of course, it would be better for everyone (including Viacom, and especially YouTube and Joost) if copyrights didn't slow down every media transaction. But until copyrights actually are peeled back to a legitimate scope, duration and enforcement regime, getting competitors with paper trails to manage it is the best we can do, and better than nothing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Joost is basically a locked down Bittorent with some big ass servers to provide data when there are no peers available with the content you want. Content is only placed there by commercial interests, NOT users - that's the bid draw to the Viacoms of the world. Joost is using it's users' bandwidth and disk space; users get free content with 1/100th the advertising as regular TV (so the creators say).
My opinion - it
Re: (Score:2)
I've been watching the lectures from Beyond Belief 2006 [beyondbelief2006.org] using Google Video and the audio and video quality are pretty good, and are very interesting and intellectually stimulating. If it hadn't been for Google Video, I probably wouldn't have seen this footage. Hosting video is extremely expensive and
In other words, there's more to internet video than naked women.
/me waits for the inevitable "You must be new here" reply.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then you got the other shows, one with a bunch of people at a beachside house, I don't even get what that show is about.
Oh then pimp my r