The first panel of the conference today is about UGC/open source advertising and of course features all the user-created 30 second spot contests that culminated at the Superbowl including the Doritos Commercial and the Dove real women campaign.

The panel includes Jill Howard-Allen who is the Online Marketing Manager of Southwest (DING!), one of my favorite airlines. She's talking about the "wanna get away?!" commercials as well as the Airline TV show they do (who knew it would be so compelling to watch people freak out dealing with travel nightmares--go figure).

She's showing some user-generated Southwest videos as well.

This has gotten me thinking, at some point are companies going to stop producing their own commercials and just go with the consumer ones 100%? The first commercial are two parents on their couch staring at their TV while a cacophony of noise--kids fighting, dogs barking--get louder and louder.

On an unrelated note, the 70's were sexy baby--yeah!!! Check out this Southwest video that came up when I searched YouTube for Southwest.

Sarah Fay of Isobar showed an adidas campaign about the worldcup on MySpace.

Editor's note: I'll keep updating this post as folks say interesting things.

Great story in the NYT about Google's legal battles. You gotta respect the fact that Google is going for it when it comes to defending itself in the legal space. As we've seen, success in our industry is largely based on who is able to be balance innovation against antiquated law that never envisioned a networked world. Go to far one direction you're Napster, say a little the other way and you're YouTube.

Fred calls me and Mark to task for being YouTube haters, and says that YouTube is the "single best thing that has happened to the Net in the past several years." I wouldn't argue with that *single* best comment, but in fairness it is right up there with voip, blogging, podcasting, Google Adsense, social software, social news, and broadband.

Who wouldn't want a free Tivo of the best video moments in the history of filmed media?! That's not the point.

Fred's second incorrect statement is that YouTube created the Flash Media player--dead wrong. They didn't make it Fred, but they did make it a hit.

[ Update: Fred say's that when he mentioned the embedded flash player he was talking about the syndicated video feature... fair enough. ]

What Fred misses completely (and he doesn't miss much) is that YouTube's real invention was *syndicated* video. Up until YouTube folks would block other domain names from using their video because of the bandwidth bills. YouTube bravely (or foolishly if their company had/does run out of money due to bandwidth bills) did was *encourage* users to syndicate their videos and used that syndication as a promotion and a link back. That was brilliant--straight up brillaint.

That concept worked, and that syndicated concept is--I believe--their innovation. Does anyone else know of anyone who did syndicated video before YouTube? I don't off the top of my head.

Now, my point all along about the YouTube service is that it is Napster on the web with very little else. Rewarding someone with a huge valuation or a huge exit for being a "pirate bay" is a joke, and that's why the big media companies shut down Napster. They did it on principle, not based on logic. Logic would have told the media companies to buy the company and make it legit slowly. If the music companies they would own iTunes, not Steve Jobs.

Now, the technology behind the site is *easy* to build. Trust me on that one because our team at Netscape built it in a month, and our technology is MUCH better than YouTube's. The reason is that the technology behind YouTube is Macromedia's not YouTube's. YouTube should get very little to no credit for their technology beyond the scalling of the service--which is not that easy (but not that hard either).

In fact, the technology piece is sooooooooo easy that Yahoo, AOL, MySpace, and countless startups have all built their own versions. Why would you pay a $1-2B to YouTube for Technology that costs < $50,000 to make/customize?! That is why companies with scale (aka traffic) like Yahoo, MySpace, Viacomm, and AOL have all created their own services. Only an idiot would pay someone $1b for technology that is a commodity and traffic that is based on their IP!

YouTube does have a great community in a very similar way that Napster and Bittorrent had and have great communities. However, if I had a bar that gave out free (stolen) beer every day I could build a great community as well.... but I digress.

What I will give YouTube a lot of credit for is leveraging mountains and mountains of illegal content to make a huge legal business, and for getting away with this plan for so long. They did show copyright holders of the world the value of their content online, and it's created great companies like Revver which are coming up with models to pay origional content owners.

So, all credit to YouTube for:

a) syndicated video
b) staying in business this long without getting sued
c) showing video holders the value of their content
d) scaling the service

If YouTube can make the shift from back-alley pirate bay to legit content distributor it will be one of the great bait-and-swith, hit-and-run acts of of all time. Napster couldn't thread that needle, and I frankly don't think YouTube will.

If they do I'll buy those dudes a bunch of beers and congradulating them on being the greatest hustlers of all time (and I mean hustler in Jay-Z sense of the word--respek!).

Podcasters and vloggers are smart... they realize that our "original format" link is basically a way for them to get free hosting from Netscape.

This person just uploaded an interview with Peter Caputa that is 70 megs!
http://money.netscape.com/story/2006/09/27/zbiztv-interview-2-peter-caputa-iv-ceo-of-whizspark-corporation

Not only does Netscape give you the free hosting of your original file, we also make you a free iPod version, and you get the free flash syndication version.

What do we get? More videos, more members, and more page views--sounds like a good deal to me.

Note: if someone out there has a vlog that gets over 25,000 views a show we would love to get you promotion in exchange for using our platform.

Looks like I started a trend... folks are not getting their dogs to do tricks for Netscape and posting them on the site with our new, supersexy, much-better than YouTube video service. :)

Please go break it try it!

details here: http://tech.netscape.com/story/2006/09/26/submit-your-videos-to-netscapecom/

It's like digg + YouTube = Netscape. Very cool.

Did you notice we put the number of votes and comments on the top right of the video? :)

In case you didn't notice we just added a bunch of basic syndicated video features to Netscape (a la YouTube).

If you see the Netscape video link (in yellow in the first image below) and you click it the list of stories will expand (image two circled in red below) to show you the cool new Netscape Flash-based media player (same at YouTube, Uncut, or Revver). What's nice about this is you don't have to leave the page and you don't have to click through to the permalink page. Sure, we're gonna lose a ton of page views, but we're helping the users consumer more content quicker--and that will make them love us more. As we all know, f you show more love to your users you're gonna win in the long-run. [ Note: hat tip to Ted who is all about the love. ]

Note: A couple of weeks ago we added the best feature of MySpace--site mail--to Netscape. This week we added the best feature of YouTube--a syndicated, Flash player--to Netscape. What feature do you think we should/will add next and why? The comments are open. :-)

Here is a sample.




... here is what happens after you click watch video... the player opens up without a page refresh!


... and of course you can take videos from Netscape and syndicate thm to your own blog. Upload tools are not opn to the public yet, but will be shortly.

Fred says that the Flash player and slick syndication stuff on YouTube is why they won. That certainly helped, however Fred's 100% wrong when he dismisses the impact of stolen content and I can prove it to you in one link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=lazy+sunday

The real reason why YouTube won is because they matched great SEO with stolen content that was not available anywhere else.

Mainstream media has been creating a huge vacuum on the Internet for over a decade. When stolen content becomes available--years ago on Napster, today on YouTube--it races off the charts. In YouTube's case it also races to #1 on Google.

SNL didn't put their videos online and the price they paid is that they lost the #1 Google ranking for their content to YouTube.

Do a search for SNL Video and YouTube is #1 and SNL is #2--how on earth is that fair? How on earth can VCs back--or in Fred's case praise--a company that is involved in massive piracy for personal gain? Now don't go giving me that "if NBC doesn't put their stuff on the Internet users will/information wants to be free" line of BS. YouTube did this so they could get rich quick--it's a business not the wikipedia or OurMedia. This is a site with advertising on it back by VCs.

If YouTube makes $250M from a sale their founders and VCs should give $225M of it back to the content owners like NBC and Loren Michaels who they stole it from!

Here is what the YouTube story is going to look like:

1. Create extremely simple technology in a couple of weeks.
2. Blow $1m in hosting costs a month.
3. Enable the stealing of people's content for a year, while turning a blind eye to piracy.
4. Claim they never, ever looked at their logs or their own sites top 20 list to see that it was filled with stolen content.
5. Sell the company and let someone else deal wth the IP headache.

If they sellout this will be the Internet industry's hit and run, and I'm gonna write the book.

If someone buys YouTube they will not be rewarding entrepreneurship, they will be rewarding piracy and they should be ashamed of themselves. Everyone else in the video space played by the rules, YouTube gave content holders the finger while shrugging their shoulders pretending they didn't know. Please.... really.

YouTube stole their way to the top while other folks behaved themselves.

Sinister but brilliant... but we as an industry shouldn't reward such behavior.

DVGuru has done a great review of video hosting platforms from YouTube to Google Video... and the new Jumpcut.

Great feature, answers a lot of the questions I've been wondering about.

Well, that took about what... three months? SNL has the Natalie raps Digital Short out the week after it aired.

The "what does SNL expect?!" excuse that Web 2.0 idiots keep spewing just went out the window. What does NBC expect? They expect to make money off their own content--not have YouTube put Google Adsense against it and make money while they sleep!!!

What next, are the Web 2.0 losers going to say that because NBC doesn't have an RSS feed yet that it's ok to steal their content? Please.

You take copyrighted clips out of YouTube and it turns into a never-ending version of Americas Funniest Home videos. Is that valuable? Perhaps. However, YouTube's traffic would be cut in half--if not by 90%--if the copyrighted content was removed.

I missed the Oscars last night, but I checked YouTube and it looks like they got the rights to air the Oscars!

How on earth did they get the rights to air the Oscars?! That's just amazing... these guys are brilliant!!! They were even able to get them to take out the commercials too!

Quick, someone (Newscorp?!) buy YouTube for $1B.... these guys are on fire!
Gay Cowboy Montage from the Oscars
Three 6 Mafia "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" at the Oscars
Ang Lee Wins
Catherine Keener at 2006 Oscars
Jon Stewart's Opening
Best Supporting Actor Winner George Clooney

Looks like YouTube has a deal with MTV2 and is changing the wording on their upload screen. According to Staci @ PaidContent Viacom will only do deals with service that do some level of policing their content.

Matt Haughey has some interesting thoughts on YouTube.com which dovetail with some of my thoughts.

• I'd argue that YouTube is the king of this movement because they have such loose and lax legal guidelines. Of course, everyone that uploads claims they own the copyright and got release forms from everyone involved and cleared anything seen on camera, blah, blah, blah, but in reality, it is totally lawless and people are basically uploading random interesting TV bits they dump right off their computer. It reminds me of Napster in 1999, totally interesting, and totally illegal in the eyes of IP lawyers.

Wow, this is kind of scary. I wrote how YouTube was a business based on copyright infringement and used all the SNL skits on their service as an example. Now SNL has come down hard on them. [ Update: Rafat took the time out to mention my last post in relation to the SNL action--Rafat is so on point. ]

Now, let me say that a couple of things:

1. YouTube does not deserve the #1 listing on Google for Lazy Sunday. YouTube's traffic is based on exactly this phenomenon: content owners don't put their content online, some users pirates the content, and YouTube--the only place to get the pirated content--becomes the #1 Google search results.

2. SNL obviously got more from the viral nature of this promotion than anything they could ever buy. They should put every single one of the skits on the Internet *for free* and put an advertisement in front of them. They would be making at least 1M a month from this within six months. SNL should also put skits that didn't make it on the show on the Internet, as well as bloggers and other colaterial material. In fact, in short period of time SNL will have more value online than offline.

3. YouTube knows they are a heaven for pirates, but I don't think they should be shut down for it. YouTube is the telephone company and they provide dialtone. What people do with that dialtone is up to them. I beleive that.

4. YouTube is not a real business (or an innovative business). This is my main point. Let's not look at YouTube's page views and claim they are some amazing business. Napster and Kazaa had a ton of traffic too--it just wasn't web-based. If you could do an Alexa graph of Kazaa, BitTorrent, Usenet, and the old Napster they would be number one through four on Alexa!

Watching DIGG, Engadget, and MySpace climb in the rankings? Those are real businesses. If those sites added the ability to distribute stolen video in two clicks they would shoot up to the top 10 sites!

Let me break it down: YouTube and other video hosting sites have made it easy to pirate stuff on the web (which is where piracy started), but they shouldn't be positioned as some revolutionary business. It's a silly, little business that anyone could setup in a week. The fact that folks are talking about them being bought for some large amount of money by Newscorp is commical. They are a glorified FTP site with TAGS people! I could set this up in a weekend with two kids in high-school and a couple of cases of Red Bull. In fact, the first two programmers to email me with a decent resume I'll back you guys to build a YouTube compeititor--provided you can build it in under five days.

3. SNL has the right to have their stuff taken down, and taken down quickly. As do the other folks who are having their content stolen daily (think MadTV, Dave Chappelle, etc). However, those folks should put some free stuff up and link to paid stuff to strike a balance between piracy and not having their content available.

Really.

Folks checking in on this post: Fred, Paul & Ben. (if you have commented on your blog feel free to post the url in the comments).