BeerFiles is a sometimes irreverent blog concerning all things to do with IT, technology, people and the media from the point of view of a hard boiled technology journalist and commentator. Stan has been in the IT game for about a quarter of a century. He has seen and written about the rise and fall of more than a few IT players and made many friends, some of whom he has even crossed swords with on occasions. Everything in this blog is purely Stan’s opinion so if you agree, wish to expand upon, correct a post or tell Stan he’s a clueless know nothing, please feel free.

Impending death of YouTube is greatly exaggerated

Written by Stan Beer

Thursday, 05 October 2006

Page 1 of 2 ! According to Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, YouTube is going down. Bernoff believes YouTube is going to be sued to death because of copyright violations like the original Napster was. However, in my view the comparison with Napster is neither fair nor correct. Reading Bernoff's blog on this subject was quite interesting because he invited readers to comment on his views and of six comments, five disagreed with him, all raising plausible arguments and most pointing to differences between YouTube and Napster. This prompted a mildly irritated Bernoff to lodge his own post admonishing the posters who disagreed with his views for indulging in "soft-headed thinking". It must be a wonderful feeling to have a monopoly on the correct way to think! As more than one poster to Bernoff's blog pointed out, the original Napster and today's YouTube are very different animals. Napster was set up for one purpose only - to illegally share music files that were subject to copyright. The only content of value on the site were music tracks from popular recording artists. There was nobody posting original content and nobody looking for original copyright free content. Of course Napster was sued and shut down and of course it failed when it reopened with copyright free material. Most internet users had dial-up connections and nobody was interested in waiting 15 to 30 minutes to download an unknown track from an artist they'd never heard of. YouTube, on the other hand was set up for users to post home-made videos. The most popular videos make it to the home page. The first two videos I saw was one of an unknown jazz-rock fusion guitarist from Russia displaying a couple of minutes of dazzling mind boggling fretwork and another of a cute young Australian girl doing a funky rap. << Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>

 

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