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Google Makes Anti-piracy a Priority for YouTube

by , 2:20 PM EST, February 23rd, 2007

Google, under fire for the massive amount of pirated video on its YouTube site, has set the offering of copyright protection technologies as one of the company's highest priorities according to USA TODAY on Friday.

"We are definitely committed to (offering copyright protection technologies)," Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in an interview. "It is one of the company's highest priorities," he said. "It is going to roll out very soon ... It is not far away."

Google recently lost an important business deal with Viacom to deliver a portfolio of licensed TV programs to customers, and hundreds of millions of ad dollars were at stake. Earlier this month, Viacom demanded YouTube remove more than 100,000 Viacom video clips from the site after the two sides failed to reach a distribution agreement. Viacom eventually struck a deal with Joost instead.

Stung by its inability to check the copyright basis of files that are uploaded, Google is developing technology to help media companies identify pirated videos uploaded by users.

Mr. Schmidt declined to give a time frame when the tools would cover all users and explained that it takes time to roll out such a sophisticated technology.

At one time, Apple was being urged to buy YouTube when it was up for sale. Apple's tendency to focus on identifiable customer technology and user interface issues and not be all things to all people led Apple to wisely steer clear of potential YouTube pitfalls.

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Observer Comments

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Close Name:MacRider Posts: 14 Joined: 15 Feb 2007
Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:35 pm Subject: Advertisers don't like YouTube...

...and other sites with "user generated content." It's the same pool of users seeing the same ads over and over again. Advertisers set campaigns to a specific number of "impressions" per visitor in a specific timeframe; usually, it's one impression per visitor in a day, or 1/24. If you see ten unique ads, it's because there's ten unique advertisers, for example. Sites like YouTube and MySpace don't "convert" well for advertisers.
The only really cool thing about YouTube is converting movies to Flash, and that's a cool way to deliver ads and content. I don't know why Google bought YouTube, other than to deliver more ads (they already had a content delivery platform).
Again, Apple was wise to stay away from YouTube.


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Close Name:gslusher Posts: 2003 Joined: 13 Nov 2002
Fri Feb 23, 2007 7:46 pm Subject: Flash not a real blessing, not even in disguise

Quote
MacRider wrote:
The only really cool thing about YouTube is converting movies to Flash, and that's a cool way to deliver ads and content.


I'm not so sure. Why do you think that the quality of YouTube videos is so low? I uploaded a video that looks great on an iPod in .mp4 format, but, on YouTube, it looks terrible. It's as if one took a nice JPEG and cranked up the compression to, oh, 1:180,000. There are artifacts, blur, smears, pixellation, and more. You could take better videos with a $15 Chinese-made "camera."


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Close Name:Terrin Posts: 350 Joined: 29 Jan 2006
Fri Feb 23, 2007 9:14 pm Subject:

Who was urging Apple to buy YouTube? These no benefit for Apple there. For Google, it made sense, as it gets to embed all the ads.

Apple, however, could always easily modify iTunes to allow user submitted videos. I highly doubt it ever will. That will piss off all of its media contributors, and Apple has never been interested in selling ads (look at its site).


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