October 19, 2007

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Dedicated Website Launches

Viacom's Comedy Central unveiled a web site yesterday for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The site will appeal to the most die-hard fans of the mock news show as it contains over 13000 video clips encompassing all of the shows' content back to 1999. Video clips are organized using tags so it's very simple to find what you are looking for if you can't remember the date of the show in question, though you can search using the date as well.

The web site launch is undoubtedly connected to Viacom's ongoing $1 billion copyright-infringement suit against YouTube. Comedy Central video clips are extremely popular on YouTube, yet the video platform never received permission, nor did they compensate Viacom for allowing users to post the copyrighted video clips. As a result of the lawsuit, Viacom realized the amount of advertising dollars being missed out on from not utilizing their huge database of clips was quite high.

YouTube finally did take a step forward against piracy Monday as they released a beta version of their "YouTube Video Identification" technology. The technology allows copyright holders to upload their video content to YouTube so that if someone uploads identical pirated content, it will be recognized. The actual owner of the content then has the option of having YouTube remove the pirated content or place advertising at the top of the video frames from which the owner would be entitled to full revenues.

Just today, a group of media companies including Viacom, NBC Universal, Microsoft and Disney among others, announced the release of a set of user-generated content principles that outline how both user-generated content sites and copyright holders should act in the prevention of copyrighted material going online from a source other than its owner. The biggest highlight of today's announcement was the absence of Google, owner of YouTube, on the list of companies forming the coalition. I would have to say though, that Google has made a more useful move by implementing technology to prevent pirated content on their platform rather than penning a set of principles on paper obviously pulled straight from the functionality of YouTube's video ID system.

Via LA Times, The Wall Street Journal