March 23, 2007

The corporate media wants to eat everything in its path …

Here it comes … what will the Caterpillar morph into after it sheds its cocoon ?

News Corp. and NBC in Web Deal

By RICHARD SIKLOS
March 23, 2007

In a long-anticipated challenge to YouTube and other online video sites, two big media companies yesterday announced a new venture to showcase their own programming across the Internet’s biggest Web sites, as well as a new jointly owned Web destination.

The News Corporation and NBC Universal will distribute their latest video fare, like episodes of “24” and “The Office” on AOL, Yahoo, MSN and MySpace, which together reach about 96 percent of the Internet’s audience in the United States.

The content, which will appear in an embedded media player on these Web sites as well as on a new separate video site that News Corporation and NBC Universal will introduce, will be supported by advertising and be free to viewers.

Viewers will also be able to edit the content and post their own videos, a popular feature of other online video sites, as well as buy downloads of movies from the 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios.

News Corporation and NBC Universal, like other media companies, have had complex and increasingly tense relationships with Google, which owns YouTube. The media companies’ copyrighted material, like television shows and music videos, show up on YouTube without the media companies’ permission. Viacom, which has held discussions on joining the unnamed new venture but so far has not done so, is suing YouTube for $1 billion on the grounds of copyright infringement.

While many media joint ventures have fizzled both online and off, the unnamed venture — which some working on the project referred to internally as “Caterpillar” — could represent one of the boldest efforts yet by conventional media companies to try to maintain control over their content and advertising relationships on the freewheeling Web.

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… and a valiant effort by much more well-informed commenters to offer the befuddled and lazy Beltway journalist some remedial coaching.

The commenters really do want this fellow Michael Kinsley to succeed, to provide the quality they know he can deliver, but seem to be getting somewhat exasperated at a lack of basic understanding combined with a snotty attitude and style.

Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8
Michael Kinsley

David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was struggling with.

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… much impact.

On the recent Hillary Clinton - 1984 video ad that made the mainstream news.