News: Sarah Hall of E! Online has the inside scoop about Comedy Central’s recent decision to ask YouTube to remove some unauthorized clips of the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, and South Park from YouTube. Turns out that Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent company, decided to remove some, but not all, clips from YouTube — which explains why many clips are still up on YouTube (as I reported here over the weekend).
Viacom stated: “We want our audiences to be able to access our programming on every platform and we’re interested in having it live on all forms of distribution in ways that protect our talented artists, our loyal customers and our passionate audiences.”
Analysis: From a business standpoint, I think Viacom’s multi-platform approach makes a lot of sense. If YouTube garners milions of eyeballs each day, it would be stupid to have all the clips removed from YouTube. While Comedy Central is building its own website with video clips, the library does not yet appear to be as large as what YouTube had. Also, I don’t think the clips of Comedy Central shows on YouTube amount to a net loss for Comedy Central. Comedy Central gets a benefit from free advertising on YouTube to pump up the popularity of their shows (this could be considerable), while Comedy Central loses the ability to package those clips on its own site, or attempt to license those clips to YouTube. In the end, Viacom decided here to “split the difference” and allow some, but not all, clips on YouTube to remain there.
