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The Oscars Do Not Like Google

Posted by jonathan at 9:49am EST on 03/01/2007

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has forced Google-owned YouTube to remove video clips of last weekend’s Oscar broadcast. Is the Academy hopelessly out of touch or just making a smart business decision? Technology reporter Rachel Rosmarin and media editor Peter Kafka squared off on the Digital Download, a blog dedicated to the day’s must-read tech stories. Here’s what they had to say.

This is going to prove to be a fatal move for the Oscars. They are making this force decision not around the business model of YouTube, but around the pure fact of copyrights. The Oscars will be missing out on the visibility and hype that YouTube and Google Video offers to organizations.

What other great opportunity does YouTube provide for the community as well as the Oscars? Highlights. People are not going to be posting boring clips on YouTube, but they will be posting the highlights and the great clips. That’s why people will go watch them on YouTube because they are the best of the best clips.

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No Responses to “The Oscars Do Not Like Google”

  1. Ajay

    Mar 5th, 2007

    I don’t think the Oscars need the publicity that YouTube will give. The Oscars have existed long before YouTube and infact it may be more in their interests to ensure the clips are not on YouTube.

  2. Jonathan

    Mar 5th, 2007

    Ajay: I do agree that they don’t need any more than they already get, but in almost any case, more publicity is good publicity.

    The world is changing and evolving. Moving to the Internet is the key factor for the generation today and that’s how the Oscars will need to move too. They will need to bring their presence online if they want to stay in the game.

  3. Ajay

    Mar 5th, 2007

    I agree about more publicity being good. However, here they have to weigh the “more publicity” with possible “copyright issues” and the copyright issues of the videos may have greater weight, hence the move.

  4. Jonathan

    Mar 5th, 2007

    Ajay, I also agree with that. But I fail to see a reason that the Oscars couldn’t just sign a deal like CBS and BBC did with Google to allow copyright permissions and do a revenue share for all the views.

    It’s a win-win situation. The Oscars aren’t holding back on copyrights because they want to stream it themselves, they simply just don’t want it online … which is odd.

  5. Ajay

    Mar 5th, 2007

    The revenue share makes sense… maybe nobody has told them this?

    Btw, your second paragraph is smaller font than the first in the comments?

  6. Jonathan

    Mar 5th, 2007

    Hmm that’s odd. Maybe a plugin is doing something funky. I see that too…. I’ll try to fix that right now. Thanks

  7. Jonathan

    Mar 5th, 2007

    There we go, all fixed up. I had a plugin in there that was doing some funky stuff with an extra div. Weird though because you shouldn’t have been seeing it. Oh well, it’s fixed now. Thanks!

  8. Ajay

    Mar 5th, 2007

    You’re welcome… but everything has become small now? Or maybe that is what you wanted :)

  9. Jonathan

    Mar 5th, 2007

    Hmm no, that’s not what I wanted. I thought I changed the font-size to 16px. Did you do a hard-refresh to make sure the style.css isn’t cached?

    It looks correct in IE6 for me

  10. Ajay

    Mar 5th, 2007

    Aaah.. it looks better now… the style was cached.

    I’m using FF right now.