Social Media Now: Can Vid Sharing Start-ups Survive the Clampdown?

From the bad timing department:  today MyToons  , a cartoon-specific video sharing site, takes the wraps off its service which has been in private beta. The site is being pitched as a place where animation pros and fans can share “their creations” not the creations of others, and naturally the company has a DMCA-compliant take down policy. Maybe there are enough pro and semi-pro animators looking interested in an online hub for MyToons to build a sizable community. But there’s no doubt that South Park clips would have been like Miracle-Gro for the start-up.

Meanwhile NBC, which has sent YouTube mixed signals–exploiting the viral impact of Dick in a Box while at the same time sending YouTube a take-down letter–has cut a deal with VMIX, a big-media friendly vid-sharing startup led by Greg Kostello, former exec VP of tech at MP3.com and president of Vivendi-Universal Net Technologies. The NBC channel offers mostly teaser clips for NBC shows as well as original shorts like Zeros, a parody of NBC’s series Heroes. There are YouTube-like tools for sharing, including embedded player code for bloggers.

At VMIX NBC appears to be pursuing the Mark Cuban/BBC model–viewing VMIX as an aggregator that can redirect traffic to NBC’s own sites. Cuban was crowing yesterday about the Viacom suit. But even he noted that the problems with current copyright law is that it exists strictly to advance the financial interests of big corporations at the expense of innovation:

The DMCA Safe Harbors as they are written will not exist for very long. You can bet the same companies that spend tens of millions of dollars to extend copyrights to ridiculous extremes, or that want to push for truly ridiculous things like a Broadcast Flag, or the new Webcast Royalties, will spend whatever it takes to get the law changed to their liking. Just as they have done multiple times before. One thing is certain, our lawmakers and lobbyists are relatively cheap compared to the
dollars at stake here.

Like I wrote yesterday, maybe it’s time to rethink copyright law along the lines of its original intent (to promote the useful arts and sciences) and using limiters other than time to protect the limited interests of creators.

A bigger problem with VMIX is that it force-feeds content into the hands of users giving them the potential to share but not load or alter. Successful social media properties allow users not only to tag or comment on media but also to contribute it. The process of contributing and collaborating is part of what makes social media entertaining to users. A site or service that limits contribution and collaboration is doomed to stepchild status.

Among the flood of predictions surrounding yesterday’s big story, my faves were delivered by Jon Fine at BusinessWeek who offered a numbered list of reasons why Viacom and Google will settle. Here are the first three:

1. No network—or networks—will be able to build a YouTube on their own

2. The ancillary traffic to Viacom clips will always be much greater at YouTube than it would be at any Viacom or Viacom-plus-whoever-site; control as the networks once understood it is over, etc.

3. Thus, it would make sense for Viacom to partner with YouTube, and especially to partner with a company that’s proven adept out of putting a system to target ads around truly massive traffic . . . .hmmmm . . . now who would that be?

 

 

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