Saturday, April 21, 2007

YouTube Alternatives

YouTube is clearly the most popular video sharing site on the web. But limits on video length, DMCA takedown notices and billion dollar lawsuits have damaged YouTube’s ability to facilitate serious copyright infringement. The smaller guys are now stepping in to fill the void.

Full length copies of well known TV shows and/or movies are readily available on a number of YouTube competitors. Watch, for example, The Office on DailyMotion, Scrubs on GoFish, or SouthPark on Veoh.

And if searching for the shows on these sites is just too much work, there are other sites that aggregate and organize this content, and embed it on their own sites. Watch any episode from any of the 11 seasons of SouthPark on Allsp.com. And new site VideoHybrid is in a class of its own, with dozens of full length movies and virtually every popular TV show. VideoHybrid even give statistics showing exactly how many times copyrights have been violated.

Its not clear if the MPAA and networks just aren’t focusing on these smaller video sharing sites yet, or if DMCA notices are simply being ignored. These sites aren’t hiding out and trying to evade the law - they’re funded by well known venture capitalists and, in Veoh’s case, copyright holders. And GoFish is actually a public company.

Hmmm. Maybe EMI should do a deal with them.

No comments: