Viacom Figures Out How To Compete With YouTube!
Oct 18th, 2007 | By James Lewin | Category: GeneralViacom has unveiled a new site for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart that’s designed to offer an alternative to YouTube and other video sharing sites.
Viacom is also demonstrating that it’s figured out how to compete with YouTube: give people what they want. The new site offers 13,000 high-quality clips, from episodes dating back to 1999. Plans are in place to include the show’s entire video history.
It’s about #$#*in’ time!
The site is chock-full of “Web 2.0” goodness, featuring tags, comments and you can even embed videos in your blog or Web page. The site will also feature “The Wayback Randomizer,” which will randomly pick a clip from any show 1999 to present with a click of a button; games, a wiki and a public forum.
We’d like to see an ad-supported daily podcast of the last night’s show, but this is a giant step in the right direction for Viacom, Comedy Central and The Daily Show.
Viacom previously sued YouTube for $1 billion.
The embedded car company ads are really overkill. After a certain point they discouraged me from watching more segments of the show.
Drew
Good point. I don’t think that there’s a good balance yet between the desire to monetize online video and people’s willingness to sit through ads. This is compounded by the fact that advertisers have been slow to more to online video, so online ad rates are lower than what they should be – leading video providers to put in longer, more expensive ads.
As time goes on, video sites that use short, targeted ads and minimize repetition are going to have the lowest number of people that are turned off by the ads, which should give them a competitive advantage.
[…] The future of television is on-demand ad-supported Internet video. Viacom, with its on-demand video sites for Jon Stewart and South Park, is moving ahead of the pack, and putting its content where its viewers are. NBC, on the other hand, is cutting deals with Netflix and letting you play catch-up if you missed a show. […]