Sure, YouTube sits at today's absolute nexus of technology and culture. But it’s also at a major crossroads of its own.
On the one hand, Google's $1.6 billion toy is credited with everything from rewriting the rules of video entertainment to influencing the outcome of presidential elections. The NBA now lives on YouTube, for example, and the site made Macaca the key word of the 2006 mid-term campaign.
Yet YouTube is also the key battleground in the fight over digital copyrights and permissions. Viacom (owner of MTV) is battling with the video service over the value of letting its content be posted there. Movie studios are trying to subpoena YouTube to learn the identity of the people posting unlicensed content. Many people speculate that YouTube sold out to Google just to get access to its team of big-league lawyers.
All this means that the very nature of the beast is changing, and not necessarily for the better. As YouTube moves to make nice with rights holders, the site risks losing the grass-roots user participation that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If the site ends up with only the content for which it can cut deals, the service will be much the poorer. While the NBA and the BBC may be in, for example, tennis has been ruled out.
There are political risks as well. YouTube has just been blocked in Turkey - over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
If all this means that YouTube ends up just another tightly managed outlet for big media, cutting-edge users may look elsewhere for their video fixes. That would be a shame, but it wouldn’t be the first time that big media stomped on its audience. Don’t get me started on the record companies!
No comments:
Post a Comment