The Daily Background

Earlier today, I got an email notifying me that YouTube deleted one of my videos (the Andy Rooney clip talking about Iraq war funding) because CBS evidently called them up and demanded it be taken down because they hold the copyright to it and don’t want it being seen by people online for free.

While it’s not really that big of a deal to me, YouTube did warn me “Repeat incidents of copyright infringement will result in the deletion of your account and all videos uploaded to that account.” Fair enough. I don’t think I’ll be deleting anything, but I don’t have any more CBS videos so I should be safe from them at least. But God help me if CNN takes the same attitude. Haha.

CBS does have own the rights to Rooney’s rants and it has full control of whether these segments can be viewed online. As a copyright holder, this is what they are afforded under law. But their attitude is fairly archaic in my opinion. Here’s why.

Distributing small clips of television programs online is the best type of advertising that television programs could ever hope for. Online popularity of the animated television series Futurama saved the series and it is now being brought to television back years after it was cancelled. The never-aired pilot of a sitcom called Nobody’s Watching was viewed so many times on YouTube, that network executives decided to pick up the show after all. Online clips of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann on sites like Crooks and Liars have boosted that show’s popularity. NBC also learned their lesson after initially getting angry about infringement and used YouTube in a brilliant marketing maneuver.

And this is all without mentioning the most obvious example. I’ll give you a hint: it starts with The C- and ends with -olbert Report. Just yesterday, the Huffington Post wrote about Stephen Colbert’s Web Dominance, which was about a novel trick the show used to boost audience participation (Stephen’s staff put edited videos of the show from YouTube on air and encouraged others to put up more).

The Colbert Report has recognized that the most effective and brilliant advertising strategy is simply to allow people to post clips of the show on the web, which turn into viral videos, getting seen by hundreds of thousands of people that haven’t heard of the show but will be inclined to watch it after they find it’s hilarious.

What possible profits could Comedy Central be losing off of small clips being distributed online? Comedy Central has similar clips of what YouTube has of the show online for free viewing. It’s not like DVDs are being sold of the show or anything, although they do offer a modest pay-to-download version on iTunes.

CBS 60 Minutes doesn’t even have that. They’re decidedly old media. They don’t understand that small copyright infringement in the form of viral videos is the best advertising that they could possibly hope for. They just don’t get it. And they’ll be scratching their heads when they realize that their ratings are down and Countdown’s ratings are up.

They’re too busy making sure that nobody somehow “profits” from the work of their employees but them– to take advantage of one of the most effective advertising methods ever. Entirely free advertising using material they’ve already shot and paid for that people want to watch.

Filed under: News Media, Z-TDB Blog