What YouTube should learn from Napster
d f tweney
September 14th, 2006
The similarities between YouTube and Napster are uncanny.
Copyright-infringing content, sudden popularity, a seeming direct
connection to the pulse of popular youth culture, scandals, a San Mateo
address. (I'm not the first one to notice all this.) But the
similarities run deeper.
YouTube is architecturally similar to the early Napster service, in
that it's a peer-to-peer service in function only. Yes, it's
user-driven, and yes, the power of YouTube is that it lets people share
videos, make unexpected connections, and find cool stuff.
Underneath the hood, though, YouTube is a big, centralized server farm,
just like Napster.
This was Napster's downfall, because it gave the record companies a
target to go after. Truly peer-to-peer services that came later, such
as KaZaA, have proved much more resilient because it's harder to
stamp out illicit copies when they're distributed all over the world.
With Napster, though, you only had to bring your court order to a
single address: Napster's.
In the end, this made Napster's legal troubles unavoidable. There was
nowhere for them to run when the hammer of the law came down, and they
had no choice but to knuckle under.
And that was a shame, not only for Napster's users but for the record
companies, who lost their last big chance to connect with their biggest
fans in a single place.
Media companies should pay attention to the Napster story when they
consider YouTube. Sure, the company is an easy target for legal action.
YouTube knows this, and by all accounts, responds quickly to claims of
copyright infringement by removing the offending videos. But as quickly
as they remove videos, people post more. Let's get real: A vast
amount of YouTube's content almost certainly violates someone's
copyright, and is only on the site because no one has complained about
it yet. That's not exactly a sustainable situation, and unless it's
checked, this problem will catch up with YouTube within the year.
That gives the TV and movie companies just about twelve months to
figure out how to get YouTube on their side. Instead of going after
bootleg videos, outfits like Saturday Night Live should be posting
their own skits-with embedded advertisements, as Calacanis suggested
awhile back. They should be reaching out with special offers to YouTube
users who have favorited their videos. They should be watching
YouTube's traffic (and its rising stars, real as well as fake) to
figure out where their next hits are coming from.
In the meantime, YouTube needs to keep going after copyrighted
material. They need to play up the substantial non-infringing uses of
the service. And they need to develop more ways for content producers
to engage their customers within YouTube, in order to make the site a
channel not only for video, but for marketing.
Because if the hammer comes down, all that opportunity is going to
evaporate. Good luck trying to do marketing over BitTorrent. Two years
from now, YouTube may look like it was television's best friend.
http://dylan.tweney.com/2006/09/14/what-youtube-should-learn-from-napster/
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