YouTube has announced their new live TV offering dubbed “YouTube TV”:
Well, we’ve got some good news! We’re bringing the best of the YouTube experience to live TV. To do this, we’ve worked closely with our network and affiliate partners to evolve TV for the way we watch today.
And:
A YouTube TV membership is only $35 a month and there are no commitments—you can cancel anytime.
Interesting.
Joseph Bernstein, writing for BuzzFeed:
But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “#PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”
Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.
Disney has severed ties with YouTube star PewDiePie after a series of anti-semitic posts. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Mr. Kjellberg said in a video a few days later that the Jan. 11 clip was a joke that went too far. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which owns YouTube, pulled ads that run on its videos from the Jan. 11 video within days of its posting, before it was taken down this past weekend. YouTube hasn’t pulled any of the nine videos in question, though PewDiePie’s account took down three of them. Google hasn’t removed ads from any of Mr. Kjellberg’s other videos.
Being a piece of shit is all the rage in 2017.
Eriq Gardner, writing at The Hollywood Reporter, on record labels starting to sue some of the YouTube to MP3 ripping websites:
On Monday, the plaintiffs filed a copyright lawsuit in California federal court, stating, “Stream ripping has become a major threat to the music industry, functioning as an unlawful substitute for the purchase of recorded music and the purchase of subscriptions to authorized streaming services.”
With a few simple mouse clicks, the lawsuit reports, infringing copies of sound recordings are made available in MP3 format. The plaintiffs suggest that “tens, or even hundreds, of millions of tracks are illegally copied and distributed by stream ripping services each month.”
Trent Reznor, speaking with Billboard, blasted YouTube for their stance on copyrighted material:
“Personally, I find YouTube’s business to be very disingenuous,” said Reznor. “It is built on the backs of free, stolen content and that’s how they got that big. I think any free-tiered service is not fair. It’s making their numbers and getting them a big IPO and it is built on the back of my work and that of my peers. That’s how I feel about it. Strongly. We’re trying to build a platform that provides an alternative — where you can get paid and an artist can control where their [content] goes.”
YouTube has responded:
The overwhelming majority of labels and publishers have licensing agreements in place with YouTube to leave fan videos up on the platform and earn revenue from them. Today the revenue from fan uploaded content accounts for roughly 50 percent of the music industry’s YouTube revenue. Any assertion that this content is largely unlicensed is false. To date, we have paid out over $3 billion to the music industry–and that number is growing year on year.
I get what YouTube is saying, but I can go there right now and type in virtually any song and find dozens of “copyright not intended” videos uploaded.
Shira Ovide and Leila Abboud, writing for Bloomberg, on the music industry’s love/hate relationship with YouTube:
More than half of Internet users in the U.S. listen to music on YouTube — by far the most popular access point — but YouTube is responsible for only 4 percent of revenue to the industry, according to a music industry trade group. The biggest record labels say Google should pay more, and they want more control over music that is responsible for what Bernstein Research estimated is one-quarter of all YouTube videos watched.
Rob Levine, writing for Billboard, looks at the strange place YouTube occupies in the music industry:
Most Internet companies need to get permission from labels in order to use their music — a negotiating dynamic that results in high fees. With services that operate under the DMCA — like YouTube and, until recently, SoundCloud — the dynamic is very different. These services also stream music uploaded by users, and copyright holders who don’t want their content online need to file takedown notices — one for each copy of each song. Instead of selling the rights to music that a service needs, label executives say they’re stuck selling the rights to music that a service essentially already has.
Well, that’s the theory. In practice, it’s more complicated.
Eamonn Forde, writing for The Guardian, looks at manager1 Peter Mensch’s claim that YouTube is the devil.
Perhaps part of Mensch’s attack on YouTube stems from him, and many others, in the 1980s handing the keys over to MTV before realising what a huge mistake it was. Cliff Burnstein, his long-standing management partner, has been quoted in the past saying that MTV was key in breaking Def Leppard, who they managed at the time and made them into, for a period, the biggest band in the world. MTV happily played expensive music videos but paid no broadcast royalties in the US, allowing its parent company Viacom to become one of the biggest media companies in the world. There are echoes here of what is happening with YouTube, and Mensch is understandably not keen to be bitten for a second time.
Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Muse, and more.↩
YouTube have announced they’re bringing 360° video to their live offerings. They’ll be streaming some of the second weekend of Coachella in this new format.
We first launched support for 360-degree videos back in March 2015. From musicians to athletes to brands, creators have done some incredible things with this technology. Now, they’ll be able to do even more to bring fans directly into their world, with 360-degree live streaming. And after years of live streaming Coachella for fans around the world who can’t attend the festival, this year we’re bringing you the festival like never before by live streaming select artist performances in 360 degrees this weekend.
YouTube will be live streaming the first weekend of Coachella this year.
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