Comedy Central Versus You Tube

First off: I love You Tube. I truly believe that they are one of the most important websites on the internet in the last 5 years, and probably one of the top 3 most important in the history of the internet so far. They basically brought internet-based video to the masses... and did it in a such way as to avoid piracy. That's exceptionally important when you think about it.

Now, along comes Comedy Central and tells You Tube "No more shall our videos appear on You Tube!"

How stupid is that?

First: The Daily Show and a hundred times moreso, The Colbert Report owe a lot of their success to You Tube. I doubt there are many people who have stopped watching Comedy Central because of You Tube. More likely, every time somebody watches a Stewart or Colbert clip on You Tube, it reminds them to tune into Comedy Central that night.

Second: Why the fuss? (1) Nobody is selling Comedy Central's content. (2) Nobody is modifying Comedy Central's content. (3) Nobody is copying Comedy Central's content from You Tube. (4) Nobody is otherwise profiting from Comedy Central's content. Most importantly, (5) Comedy Centeral sure as hell isn't paying a penny for having their content hosted on You Tube. (Do you have any idea how much 50,000 hits of a 10 megabyte file costs the host server in bandwith? That's 500 gigabytes. That's more than $1,000 for just a single video clip. You Tube was hosting 15 or 20 Comedy Central clips a month like that.) With Comedy Central hosting all its own videos now, it is paying for the server bandwidth instead of You Tube.

And finally, Third: Why would Comedy Central want to make it inconvenient to view these clips? Putting a You Tube video on a blog is a simple thing. You just copy and paste. You Tube's video player and the selected video are embedded right into the blog. It's easy and user friendly to watch the videos. One click on the You Tube viewer is all it takes to start the video playing. Now, in order to view a Comedy Central clip, you have to first click on a link that takes you to Comedy Central's web site. Then, most annoyingly, you have to actually locate the video you are looking for (assuming it is still on the front page, otherwise it is off to the archives!), and then you have to pop open Comedy Central's video player. Compared to the "Oh look! (click)" of You Tube, watching a Comedy Central video now now falls in "Why bother?" territory.

I can't figure out what the folks at Comedy Central (and any other television channel who is saying, "Please stop exposing our shows to millions of potential viewers.") were thinking here. I really can't. I just hope that eventually they pull their heads out of their collective asses and start allowing people access to their content via You Tube again.