One of the biggest problems that content owners face today is that kids have grown up stealing music.

By Michael Goldstein, Reprinted from Mediaweek

The music industry fought this fight too long and as a result has lost this generation, which now expects to receive its video content in a similar way. Today’s kids don’t distinguish between web video and television—to them it’s just content. Perhaps the lesson that traditional media companies should take from this example is to find ways to join consumers, not beat them.

What irks the studios is that disruptive companies like YouTube have built strong businesses based on users uploading premium content they don’t have permission to use. It’s not so much the fact that the content is on the platform. It’s more that YouTube is not rewarding the studios as content owners with the advertising dollars it has been able to monetize from their content.

Alan Bell, Paramount Studios’ executive vp and first chief technology officer, doesn’t dispute that “YouTube is an efficient sharing platform,” but he adds, “It’s just not being used properly. Logically, it seems that a good idea is to have companies like YouTube simply develop software that serves the needs of the entertainment industry.”

That would seem like an easy enough task, but before this happens, the parties need to resolve who owns the content copyright. Who is going to exploit the copyright? Who sells the advertising? And what assets go to what platform at what time?

“You write YouTube a letter and the content gets removed within eight hours,” explains Bell. “But the site is so vast that the next day it’s up on the platform again, posted by another user. One solution is to write software based on keywords that recognizes what content is up there. If it can recognize it, then it can be monetized.

“The technology of rights management today is not yet perfect,” Bell continues. “So what we need to do in the meantime is to distinguish between ‘fair use,’ ‘popular use’ and ‘reasonable use.’ Identify what people want to do with those rights, and then package and market those rights accordingly.”

This all makes sense, but I can’t help but wonder if the studios are overthinking this a little. They are obsessed with their intellectual properties, and justifiably so. But we’re not just dealing with IP piracy, we’re dealing with a social lifestyle phenomenon.

“Everyone wants to consume their media the way they want to consume it. You can’t control that,” acknowledges Stefanie Henning, senior vp, global marketing and new media for Fox Television Studios. “But we do want an environment where consumers can get to our content in the best format possible on a platform that we’re able to monetize.”

Instead of waiting for YouTube to come up with a viable solution or worse yet, fighting the way consumers have grown accustomed to doing things, perhaps the studios should embrace it.

I’m not saying that the studios stop monitoring content posted on YouTube. Rather, I’m suggesting that content owners like the studios give consumers the same tools they’ve grown to expect from sites like YouTube.

“Users want to be passionate about what their interests are. The habit of sharing them has become a cultural phenomenon,” says Richard Rosenblatt, founder and former chairman of MySpace. “Online Communities like YouTube, MySpace and me.TV are all about embracing self-expression.”

Whether studios like it or not, users are going to find ways to rip off clips from favorite television shows like NBC’s The Office. So let’s give it to them. The TV studios already have the eyeballs and the advertising inventory. They also have branded content that keeps users coming back. Logically, they should be able to sell advertising, no matter where the audience is. The studios need make video clips available on their Web sites—not just what they want people to see, which they are already doing, but what people want to see. Equally important, they need to provide the video-embed codes so users can share the content on any community pages they want. If users go to the studio’s host site only once to get the codes to share on their community pages, it doesn’t matter. Because with the right technology, the studio’s host site can stream advertising to those feeds as part of the user experience.

Once users discover that some of the coolest clips from their favorite TV shows are posted online via the studio’s site immediately after a show airs, the amount of unauthorized uploading of video content on sites like YouTube should diminish.

Better yet, the networks will have engaged thousands of users legitimately to virally market their content all over the Internet—just as they’re already doing thanks to sites like YouTube.

To take it one step further, it wouldn’t surprise me if the studios find ways to sign users up and reward “power users” for influencing the communities they reach—just like marketing practices in the early days of the Internet.

Popularity: 3% [?]