Youtube, the worlds largest video website is cosying up to its once fiercest rival Hollywood and its paying dividends.

Recently Lionsgate agreed a revenue share agreement giving the film studio their own branded video channel to broadcast movie and TV clips. This agreement is thought to continue with other studios in talks and ready to jump aboard.

Youtubes stance comes after years of being accussed of allowing pirate material to be shown via its website. It is also now discussing shared revenue and piracy protection for films and TV shows.

“We’ve been working with them on filtering and they’re doing a pretty good job,” said an executive at a major media company that has been critical in the past of YouTube’s antipiracy efforts. “We’re pretty impressed with the results and their ability to identify our clips and allow us to automate the process.”
Google has also engaged interest of Hollywood with its new ad delivery and content tracking technology that it has developed. Google could one day allow the content owners to insert ads into unauthorized video clips wherever they are posted on the internet.

Should Google succeed in convincing Hollywood to share content on YouTube, many of the company’s copyright woes could be put behind it. Google could also generate new revenue from selling ads against popular television shows and films.

Currently Google does not advertise with most of its online videos. It cannot legally sell advertising against pirate material and the home recordings on its website is generally too boring or even controversial to appeal to advertising companies. HAving better content that viewers want to watch could improve Google’s disappointing attempts to make money from the massive volume of Youtube traffic.

Using its new technology Google can make a digital fingerprint of a video and then find all unauthorized clips and if the owner wishes, an ad can be inserted into the video.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted that his company was working on this kind of technology “Lionsgate works with people who upload segments of the Lionsgate movies that they like and they capture them using our ClaimWare content product.” Schmidt said.

This system wouldnt solve all of the studios problems though, as one executive at a major media company. Film studios would be profiting from (rather than punishing) piracy. “Sure, it’s easy to say, ‘Wouldn’t it make sense to monetize these unauthorized clips,’” said the source. “But if you say ‘Go ahead and make unauthorized copies. We’ll just make money off of them’ aren’t you legitimizing piracy?”

YouTube is currently defending itself against a $1 billion copyright infringement suit filed by Viacom. Whilst YouTube is still the internets dominant video site, with over 34% of market share it is seeing the big entertainment players gravitate towards its competitors like Hulu, the video portal backed by NBC and News Corporation.

Hulu has already established revenue splits between itself and the content owners. “The days of the 50-50 split between content owners and Web sites are over,” said a Media executive. “Content owners are not going to take less than 70% anymore and some are getting 90%. In Hulu’s case, 70% goes to the content owner. Hulu has 20% and the Web sites with the distribution deals get the remaining 10% of revenue.”

These aren’t close to what Google was willing to accept in the past, but the search giant now appears more willing to compromise, said two studio executives.

The studios also realize that Google, despite its problems with YouTube’s revenue, is not in a weak position as it has more than 70 million unique monthly visitors, making it the third most visited site on the Internet.

The simple fact is that the worlds biggest video website has to be showing the best content available or it wont be the biggest for long.

worldtvpc.com

Related posts:

1. YouTube shows full length MGM movies online free
2. Youtube success story. How did it happen?
3. YouTube showing Full Length Movies soon?
4. Dont Blinx or you might see BBC’s Iplayer
5. Joost gets a boost with Flash video integration