Apparently, Google is in hot water over copyrighted material that is available on YouTube. I am not completely shocked by this, but some of the things the media companies are saying are really dumb. For example:
Viacom, which owns popular programs like "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "South Park," said that clips of its programming had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times" on YouTube.
So, 1.5 billion hits and what do Viacom want to do? They want to shut it down! Um, am I the only one who thinks that 1.5 billion hits would have brought in significant advertising revenue?
The whole reason Google bought YouTube is so that they can advertise on it, but instead of trying to capitalize on the potential benefit, Viacom are trying to kill the site altogether.
Personally, I can’t wait until the current crop of media companies to simply die out; it seems inevitable – after all, they just don’t seem to understand any technology created after 1980. And what they don’t understand, they try to kill! At least with them out of the way, someone can finally produce a HD-streaming movie service and I can watch any movie I want, on-demand. Man, that’d be sweet!