Comments on: NBC finds formula for fighting piracy

Trouble finding SNL's Sarah Palin skit or Olympic spots on YouTube? That's because NBC has come up with a template for defeating such infringement, its general counsel says.

[cyberspittle]

Does it use HDCP? If not, what is to stop someone from taking video out of one system and record it as video in on another?

[Blake4]

Maybe there are numbers to back this story up, but anecdotally speaking, I watched the Tina Fey skit on YouTube--the whole thing. The one I watched isn't there any more, but whaddaya know, another one is up in its place.

[Dalkorian]

OOoooooooh, don't let anything pesky like REALITY distort the message!

I noticed how they avoided mentioning p2p.

Really it doesn't matter to me anyway, I have better things to do that watch Nothing But Commercials (NBC).

[dustinsherrill]

I tried looking on NBC.com and nbcolympics.com to watch the opening ceremonies afterwards and never could find what I was looking for. So it turns out that I wasn't one of the 99% watching it on their website.

[Dalkorian]

TPB. 'Nuff said.

[zizzybaloobah]

I don't mind watching SNL videos on nbc.com, but the problem is, they often don't put the best and most talked about skits on the website - for example, the Cougar Den skit from last season featuring Cameron Diaz. They only feature a backstage interview about the skit.

[Allshookup4]

NBC is stuck back in the fifty's! It doesn't hurt you or your stupid show for a 5 minute clip to be posted online. Maybe you should be spending your time and money on new shows that don't suck.

[msjonker]

Congratulations, NBC. You just spent a lot of money to prevent you from getting free advertising.

[Jack K1]

Embedded advertising. Copy and distribute all you want. Problem solved.

[jemiller0]

Has anyone ever proved that this advertising **** even works? It is sensless and has NO effect on me. It's a waste of time and money and is probably just a sham, just like Wall street.

[chriswininger1]

Maybe they're gone now, but I just watched afore mentioned skit on Youtube the other day. It was the complete skit and I had no trouble finding it.

[gerrrg]

I recorded OTA digital of the opening and closing ceremonies on my computer, and it played back perfectly on my computer.

Thing is, the answer to the question of how to prevent piracy, is to provide the show online from a legitimate site. Hulu is my favorite site to catch up on stuff I missed, and I've actually clicked through some of the ads.

[inachu]

It's almost useless to watch videos on NBC as they have a very short shelf life.
Now only if I could watch every tv show of "60 minutes" online or find them on itunes then I'd be a happy camper........ yes EVERY show of 60 minutes.....

[Magicland]

This will be really funny when NBC goes under because nobody watched their programming. You don't know about the programming, you don't watch the programming. People go to YouTube, they don't usually hang out at NBC.com. So if they don't see it at YouTube, they don't go to NBC.com to watch more. Congratulations, NBC, on raising a young sapling while the forest burns around you...

[troppp]

No problem there. The govt. will just bail out NBC.

[TV James]

My wife started at YouTube, got really annoyed when she couldn't find it. Then she moved to Saturday Night Live's site, which she's said for years was cumbersome and difficult to use. The video kept stuttering and stopping. Even after she closed the tab, the audio continued to stutter and chirp and blurp until we completely shut down and restarted Firefox. At that point, I suggested Hulu. And there it was, and watchable.

Now, my wife uses Hulu. And she knows it's a Fox/NBC project. But it never would have occurred to her to start there. And by the time she got there, she was really muttering heavily about NBC being a pain in the rear and being unhelpful and making people jump through hoops and so on.

If my wife is like most people, they've bought into the Google machine as the place to start your search. Until YouTube's search results include results on all of the "competing" video sites the way Google.com does for normal searching, NBC does a disservice by yanking the clips rather than just monetizing them where they land.

[zeroplane]

NBC executives have "template" to stop piracy.. Pats executives on head..
Good for you! Run with that.. rolls eyes, continues downloading videos from torrents, file sharing networks, newsgroups, private networks, http servers, and black hat streaming video networks.

Yeah, you justified that huge budget for the "stopping piracy" and protecting our brand projects, yeah for you go cash your check!!

[Lerianis]

Exactly right. The fact is that this has not stopped 'video piracy' (which there is no such thing in the real world) at all.

[cohaver]

Democrats Obama Government Control of your Life We entering the Outer limits Control Control Control what we see hear and know . Divide us into class's Divide us into Towns Control Control Big Brother Looks a lot like a Democrat theses Days

[Renegade Knight]

Since the same formula fights fair use, I don't think they have a solution at all.

[geotopia]

Wow, this GC is quite the corporate ASSet (oops, Caps Lock stuck there). If I was a GE/NBC shareholder, I'd be screaming to get him fired. Why in the world would they want to remove content!? You've got SNL which has been losing viewership over the years and a highly popular skit that could bring back old SNL fans and generate interest in new ones, and he wants to remove it, or otherwise limit it's play? Worse, he's all proud of himself and bragging about it. It would be like a Rock band wanting their songs removed from radio play. In the 50's the labels were worried about radio play. By the 60's they were bribing (payola) the radio stations to play their songs. The same will play out for all the various types of media in the near future. Those who fail to learn by history are doomed to repeat it. Good luck in this new paradigm NBC (Non-relevant Broadcasting Corporation).

[rklrkl]

Why would I go to Youtube to watch a lousy quality clip of a TV show when the HD version of the entire SNL show for that weekend is available elsewhere (brought to you by the letter "T")? As usual, lazy Cnet journos cow-tow to the media powers by failing to mention this. Did NBC Universal manage to pull down all available HD copies of the entire SNL show featuring Tina Fey? Lemme just search on the Net - nope, they're all still there.

If you've going to post an article about how "successful" NBC Universal was at "protecting videos from online piracy", be a proper journalist and investigate if that claim is true. It's clearly not and "online piracy" involving the "T word" is as flourishing as ever, it seems. I'd be surprised if this posting survives - after all, you don't want to upset those media conglomorates now, do we?

[marc_90292]

I agree with one of the postings: NBC seems stuck in the fifties.
Why on earth would any broadcaster NOT use the enormous potential for PR and free advertising for its shows? Need money? Embed commercials as other outlets do.

[HlLLARY CLITON]

My guess is Cotton is celebrating victory too soon

[gregorytga]

Eh, the postings I saw of the Palin clip were the NBC player embedded in blogs. I suppose that's a victory if you viewed clips as your arch-nemesis instead of Bit Torrent. Honestly, most the posts here are completely reactionary. As mentioned NBC only posts selected skits.

Really if NBC wanted to make a boon in sales, they'd release TV Shows like Heroes an hour before airing on iTMS/Xbox 360 store as there's a large desire in America to be first, be it standing in line for a movie or for an iPhone and place a 20 second spot, "Heroes is brought to you by...." whatever company. You have to encourage people to go legal by offering them something cheaply and somehow significant in justification to pay. NBC has a right try and exert control over its content but its going about it in a manner that's adjourn. I'd attribute this to being the transitioning of thinking about content and ways to reach the audience. Having been friends with a few marketing majors and accounts planning majors the problem I always felt when it came to digital media that those who went into the field often had sadly low understandings of the technologies themselves and relied others as they sometimes saw that the technology itself was beneath their ideas. The classic portrayal of old-world media giants as lumbering may have been accurate even 7-8 years ago but these days they're more and more populated with younger teams, as a few ex-classmates work for the large marketing firms that deal with media giants like NBC.