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NBC and Fox square up to YouTube
23.03.2007
Old media giants NBC and Fox announced yesterday that they were joining forces to launch an online-video portal in an attempt to counter YouTube’s dominance.
The new YouTube rival initiative is set to launch this summer, with a reportedly large chunk of both companies' marketing and promotional budgets channeled into its development.
This announcement follows Viacom's recent lawsuit against YouTube for intentional copyright infringement. The Google-owned company is being sued for US$1bn.
YouTube, which started just over two years ago, was named Time magazine's Invention of the Year in 2006 and is said to receive over eight million hits per day.
Although YouTube prohibits the uploading of copyrighted material, there is still prolific uploading of this material onto the site.
In February of last year NBC asked for the removal of some of its copyrighted content from YouTube, including clips from its Saturday Night Live show which reportedly drove up traffic on the YouTube site by a large degree.
NBC and Fox hope to counter this by using MySpace, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL as distribution partners, as opposed to having one central site for content. Together, these four sites reportedly host 96pc of internet users in the US.
Not all media companies are banding together to eliminate YouTube, however. Earlier this month CBS cut a deal with the company to show highlights from its NCAA basketball tournament.
Quincy Smith, president of CBS, said that the deal was a good move and that he felt it would be naïve of CBS to create its own site full of content only to have it bypassed by YouTube.
By Marie Boran
This announcement follows Viacom's recent lawsuit against YouTube for intentional copyright infringement. The Google-owned company is being sued for US$1bn.
YouTube, which started just over two years ago, was named Time magazine's Invention of the Year in 2006 and is said to receive over eight million hits per day.
Although YouTube prohibits the uploading of copyrighted material, there is still prolific uploading of this material onto the site.
In February of last year NBC asked for the removal of some of its copyrighted content from YouTube, including clips from its Saturday Night Live show which reportedly drove up traffic on the YouTube site by a large degree.
NBC and Fox hope to counter this by using MySpace, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL as distribution partners, as opposed to having one central site for content. Together, these four sites reportedly host 96pc of internet users in the US.
Not all media companies are banding together to eliminate YouTube, however. Earlier this month CBS cut a deal with the company to show highlights from its NCAA basketball tournament.
Quincy Smith, president of CBS, said that the deal was a good move and that he felt it would be naïve of CBS to create its own site full of content only to have it bypassed by YouTube.
By Marie Boran