Video-over-the-Internet can be a dangerous thing if you’re a government looking to manage messages. That’s why Turkey and France stand out today as examples of just how threatening unfiltered video can be to political regimes.
A court in Turkey has ordered YouTube to be banned in the country following an escalation of dueling videos that appeared on the site, with Greek and Turkish users trading insults via video clips. The real offenders, from the court’s perspective, are the Greeks, who reportedly accused the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, of homosexuality.
It’s against the law in Turkey to criticize Ataturk or “Turkishness,” and I guess the suggestion that Ataturk might be gay is just such criticism, in the court’s eyes. YouTube had agreed to take down the videos, but the prosecutor moved forward with this case anyway. YouTube, it seems, is just too dangerous.
France, on the other hand, is making a large part of video-based citizen journalism illegal. The French Constitutional Council has passed a law that criminalizes a huge swath of video-based citizen journalism by making it illegal for anybody other than a professional journalist to film or broadcast acts of violence. Eyewitnesses who film acts of police brutality, for example, or owners of web sites that post videos of riots could be imprisoned under the new law.
The intent of the law, however, was to cut down on acts of juvenile deliquency — the specific idea was to bar the video display of “happy slapping” incidents, where groups of people gang up on individuals for a bit of violent fun (for those of you who don’t know what this sickening phenomenon is, take a look at some of these videos). Nevertheless, the broad language of the law as it was passed could ensnare other kinds of socially useful videos in its net.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:46 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Everybody is trying to figure out how to make this whole Internet video thing work as a business. Even YouTube, the hottest Internet video site out there, is struggling to find a sustainable business model and a steady supply of content.
One start-up, Next New Networks, is launching tomorrow six Internet video channels that feature original content and short videos (3 to 11 minutes.) Headed by Herb Scannell, former MTV Networks Chairman, and backed by $8 million in venture funding from Spark Capital and Benchmark Europe, and individuals including MTV co-founder Bob Pittman, Next New Networks hopes to bring “order out of chaos” by aggregating short clips into “TV channels” so that advertisers can make sense of where to put their budgets.
Along with trying to develop new forms of video advertising, they’re also developing new advertising tracking mechanisms to find out what kind of audiences their short clips generate on other sites such as YouTube. Next New Networks will accept user-generated videos and hopes to create a mass market for videoblogging.
This all sounds intriguing, but vague. Like every other Internet-based video venture, execution is everything and it’s difficult to see how Next New Networks plans to break the mold until it launches.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:30 PM | Print | Comments (0)Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said yesterday that Viacom’s own web sites have seen a spike in traffic following the company’s decision to pull its videos from YouTube. Speaking at a at a Bear Stearns Cos. investment conference, Dauman said that soon after the company yanked 100,000 videos off of YouTube, a move prompted by the break-down in talks between YouTube’s owner Google and Viacom, “we found traffic increase on our own sites.”
That makes a lot of sense — Comedy Central’s “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” are big draws and were among the most popular sources for videos on YouTube. The real question is: are these and other Viacom-related clips generating fewer overall viewers now than when they were on YouTube? In other words, Viacom’s own site traffic may have jumped, but it’s possible that fewer viewers are accessing Viacom-related clips now.
In any event, even if a YouTube deal would have generated more eyeballs for Viacom, Dauman said he doesn’t like the ambience of the site because professionally produced videos appear side-by-side with user-generated videos, creating an environment that makes it difficult to draw top-notch advertisers.
“Premium advertisers are not going to pay a lot for [video clips of] a cat going to the bathroom,” Dauman said.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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