I’m going to start a series of posts where I look at a company that’s huge and is doing something I wouldn’t if I was running it. The aim is to write one of these a week, so this will probably end up being the only one I do, sigh. Today the company that I think could be doing something differently than I would do is NBC Universal.
What’s NBC doing? Well one of my many feeds yesterday had embedded the short clip from Saturday Night Live featuring Justin Timberlake and Beyonce. It was one of the funniest things (that didn’t involve Tina Fey as Sarah Palin) I had seen on SNL for a while. The problem is I embedded the YouTube video on this blog at about 5pm and at about 9pm I was showing the Bee the video when I got a “This video is no longer available message” and when I did a search on YouTube I got a message saying that NBC Universal had claimed copyright and YouTube had to take down the video.
So, I looked around the NBC Universal site for the clip, with no luck, found another clip of Timberlake on SNL that I wanted to check out and I got a message saying the clip wasn’t available in my region. It’s fair enough that NBC doesn’t want their video on the YouTube site, but make sure there is an alternative that’s easy to check out and view for people who want to see it.
The thing is the community is smarter then the company. So I found the video on Vimeo instead. I don’t know if NBC has someone monitoring YouTube for their copyright content, but if they do that person is a cost without any return. The return of letting more people see the video clips is distribution and a raise in interest in the product so more people might possibly want to watch the show and see what else they do. This could help them get distribution deals in Europe and other places where SNL is not popular at all. Silly move by NBC Universal and if I was running it I would have done things differently.
