Exploding TV (continued)

Two comments from my post this morning:

Just a matter of time before the happy go lucky times of share any
video you can get your hands on is brought to a screeching hault by the
media companies who have ownership over these properties. The writing
is being etched on the wall as we see HBO already beginning to petition
congress to prevent anyone from copying any HBO video.

The MPAA thought they could avoid it, but we are seeing a repeat of the
napster file sharing network days…almost page for page.

I just wonder if sites like YouTube or Google will suffer the same fate as Napster and it’s kin.

And:

So is posting copyrighted material on your website fair use? All these
new video services popping up may very well be experiencing a surge in
growth but when you take away the massive amounts of copyrighted
material from their website, a dropoff in viewership is likely, no…
definitely going to occur. I like to call this the napsterization of
video with services like youtube and the like offering full episodes of
shows and even clips from the winter Olympics when it specifically says
near the end of the Olympic broadcast that no clip can be recreated or
shown without the explicit consent of NBC, and yet you’ll find these
videos online. Now that these networks are making money off of these
shows, it’s only a matter of time when the MPAA and other regulatory
boards bring the hammer down on these video services. Youtube will be
no more…

I don’t think its quite the same as the Napster case because the courts have ruled that these services have to be built with the specific intent of sharing copyrighted material in order to be deemed complicit in the illegal act.  That is not and was not the purpose of Youtube, Vimeo, etc.  They were built and are being used to share personal videos.

However, it is trivial to share copyrighted material as I did this morning in my post.  You can see the Olympics logo in the bottom of the YouTube video proving it is owned by NBC.

But one thing is for sure, people want to share this stuff and people want to watch this stuff.  The TV companies need to learn the lessons of Napster.  You cannot put pandora back in the box.

The television companies need to make this stuff available on the web in a free and easy manner.  They need to give us the embedded flash player code to put on our weblogs to show the video.  It should contain a pre-roll and post-roll ad.  The ad should be short, like 5-10 seconds, so people don’t fast forward through it.

Because if they don’t adopt this new model of video sharing, they will have another Napster on their hands and this time the legal precedents have been set and they don’t look good for them.