Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Comedy Central pulling ‘Daily Show’, Colbert from Hulu; Embedded videos to go dead

One month after NBC yanked all the comedy videos from Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” run off its websites, Comedy Central is pulling its most popular content from Hulu.com.
Viacom’s decision to delete its Comedy Central programs “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” from Hulu will create a lot of dead links for websites using embedded videos. (See reports by EW and Gizmodo.)
That includes my video website, One Stop Video.
I started One Stop Video in March 2009 as an experiment in video aggregation. The idea was to curate some of the best videos from around the Web, including Atom.com, Break.com, CollegeHumor, FunnyorDie, Hulu, Vimeo and YouTube.
That one-year experiment comes to an end today.
I had hoped that the embedded videos I posted would stay active for the foreseeable future. But that was not to be.
In addition to Hulu and NBC.com deleting videos, I’ve seen videos discontinued because of copyright concerns.
It’s a waste of time to build a library of fun and informative videos if those videos aren’t going to be there to be enjoyed.
Speaking of copyright issues, a good article by Techdirt today calls out the overzealous copyright police at YouTube for silencing a video by law professor Lawrence Lessig. His video used a snippet of a Warner Music song to demonstrate a point about fair use. Apparently Warner and/or YouTube thought it wasn’t fair use and silenced it.
I’ve seen this many times on YouTube.
Consider the video in the screenshot below. A remix artist made a mashup of Disney Tinkerbell videos and the Gwen Stefani song “Sweet Escape.” The record label objected and had the music pulled.
Or how about the video below it? It was a short clip from “Saturday Night Live” on YouTube that NBC ordered deleted. Hence the dead link.
As I’ve said many times before, nothing’s permanent on the Internet.


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