Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors to fail–from competing corporate interests to anti-trust question that may arise (since the consent decree in the 1940s that first tried to separate movie making from movie exhibiting there’s always been a tension that arises when the makers of entertainment content collude to control distribution).

But I don’t see any inherent reason why YouTube and NewTube can’t succeed side-by-side. After all, new media technologies rarely entirely obsolete old ones. Yeah, talkies made silent movies obsolete and color consigned black-and-white movie-making to an arty niche. But books, magazines, movies, radio and television are all still with us 15 years into the commercial Internet era. And the
filmed entertainment business has a pretty successful track record in adapting to changes in signal distribution technology. When VCRs first hit the market in the 1980s the filmed entertainment business resisted, pricing pre-recorded movies at nearly $100 to try to damp consumer demand and protect old business models. Today the so-called secondary markets–television licensing and DVD sales and rentals–are worth twice as much money annually to a company like Time Warner compared with movies in theatrical release.

The dollar volume of the online advertising business today dwarfs the dollar volume of other sectors of the entertainment business (recorded music sales, for example). If NewTube does nothing more than capture a fraction of that for the producers of Heroes, Family Guy or 24, it will be a smashing success. And that success will have no impact on the growth of social media properties like
YouTube.

It seemed yesterday like people were mostly talking past each other with NewTube skeptics wondering out loud about the venture’s functionality, and NewTube believers wondering out loud about YouTube’s ability to compete for ad dollars.

But given what has been announced so far it seems to me that YouTube and NewTube are designed to scratch different itches.
NewTube is all about distribution. YouTube is all about participation. NewTube is Internet media. YouTube is social media. The difference is a question of focus. The entertainment value of TV, however it is distributed, comes from the content itself. People enjoy the leisure activity of watching well-written, slickly produced stuff.  The entertainment value of social media comes from a sense of community involvement. The people enjoy the leisure activity of making, contributing and tagging.

Yesterday I raised Fred Wilson’s question about social media authenticity. Slapping social-enabled functionality onto traditional media won’t in itself transform traditional media into authentic social media. But it may help open new, hybrid distribution platforms for traditional media. The presence on the Internet of traditional media with social functionality won’t undermine the appeal of authentic social media which focuses not on content but on people.

In an otherwise excellent analysis on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote:

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

Arrington would be right if NewTube was all about creating an authentic social media property. But that doesn’t seem to be the intention.

In the discussion of how user-generated content and user-generated distribution will transform traditional media the Net is full of parties with dogs in the fight and the discussion perpetually devolves into absolutes: “We Get It!” shouts one side. “No you don’t,” shouts the other. But for the truly fearless I offer the recent history of the pornography business as proof that professional product, social re-distribution, and user-generated content can live happily side-by-side.

From the days when papyrus was the cutting edge “signal distribution technology,” pornography has been at the forefront of media innovation. In the earliest days of the home video boom, it was the porn business that led the way with semi-pro and amateur content (Ed Powers’ Dirty Debutantes series of videotapes remains a landmark in the development of prosumer media).  In the earliest days of the commercial Internet, it was the porn business that did pioneering work in online payment systems. Today the pornography industry is larger in dollar volume than the so-called legitimate filmed entertainment business despite the fact that its leading corporate commercial producers face a volume of online file sharing that embarrasses the volume confronting the music business (try a Morpheus search for Jenna Jameson). And an entire economy exists to support user-generated content–from the personal
websites of amateurs to properties like Homeclips which aggregate amateur content.

If only News Corp and NBC can come up with content as compelling as MILF Money or Baby Doll Naughty Confessions, NewTube would really be on to something.