Not much you in Sony’s tube
TEXT OF STORY
SCOTT JAGOW: Google’s video website, YouTube, is facing all kinds of heat for copyright infringement. Last month, the media company Viacom sued Google for a billion dollars. Today, Sony launched a rival to YouTube in Japan. It’s a video-sharing website that’ll be friendly to movie studios and TV producers. Ashley Milne-Tyte has more.
ASHLEY MILNE-TYTE: Sony says it will monitor videos posted to the site to ensure they’re not breaking copyright laws or offending people with raunchy content.
The company hopes advertisers will flock to this pristine environment to tout their wares.
Trouble is, analyst Rob Enderle says, where does the humble user fit into all this?
ROB ENDERLE: It always worries me when you’ve got a service that’s supposedly targeting a consumer market, where the primary benefits seem to be more closely related to corporate benefits or needs.
As for policing all that content, Enderle says software can do some of the work, but not all.
Deploying humans to watch each video would get prohibitively expensive, he says, if the site were flooded with submissions.
But Enderle doubts that will happen, given Sony’s lack of focus on the user.
In New York, I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte for Marketplace.
JAGOW: Yet another new competitor to YouTube: a website called Joost. It’s an online TV network. Joost already has a deal lined up with Viacom and CBS to provide programming, and it’s lined up some big advertisers. Yesterday, the company announced that 31 companies have signed on to provide ads.
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