Page 334 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Onl ne D g tal F lm and Telev s on | 1

Some corporations not only battle the dissemination of copyrighted materials
being distributed by users, but also oppose a type of user-created programming.
In the same way that friends and communities shared mixed audio cassette
tapes in the 1980s and 1990s (songs arranged and “programmed” for a target
audience), online video sharing sites such as YouTube give users the chance to
gather their own selection of clips on personal pages. The pages showcase their
personal user-created content as well as videos collected from other sources with
the intention often being, as with MySpace pages, to program media that de-
fines the tastes and interests of the page owner. As a result, these user pages can
be bookmarked to target their own audiences who migrate to their program-
ming. For instance, users whose interests range as widely as political campaign
materials, parkour demos, geriatric video blogs, and up-to-the-minute episodes
of American Idol can go to their favorite sites to one-stop shop for the latest en-
tries. Frequently, the amateur programmers who offer these video content sites
edit out commercials or mix together free and copyrighted material, a charac-
teristic that viewers usually enjoy and that concerns broadcasting companies.
Activists such as Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig and scholar/musician
Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) speak out publicly in support of creative rights and
against copyright legislation that they believe unconstitutionally inhibits the
progress of science and useful arts.
Some independent online productions have found particular success from
the cultural phenomenon of “viral video,” which addresses the traffic that a par-
ticular video clip or video producer attracts through word of mouth, Internet
sharing, and community-based popularity and aggregator sites such as Digg and
Netvibes. Within weeks or just hours, a popular video on YouTube can spread
internationally through the above “viral” networks of individual users and com-
munity sites sharing the video clip. Often the popularity of a video is a one-
time sharing experience; in other cases, it can lead to the continued success of a
strong fan base as has happened with, for instance, Flash-based online cartoon
Homestar Runner and the fictional serial webcam video blog, Lonelygirl15.
These operations were started by individual or group artists who looked to the
Internet as a positive outlet for distribution and attention. Many corporations,
on the other hand, have been more wary and slower to catch on. One example
of corporate reaction to viral videos is the explosive success of “Lazy Sunday,” a
comical music video that was featured on a December 2005 episode of NBC’s
Saturday Night Live (SNL). Fans downloaded and shared several copies of the
video on YouTube until the number of hits exceeded 5 million by February 2006.
NBC’s response at that point was to demand the removal of all user-added copies
of the video from YouTube. Since then, NBC has tried to find a balance and to
use YouTube to attract and measure their viewership. The broadcasting company
set up its own branded presence on YouTube and was more prepared for the suc-
cess of its next SNL Christmas video, “Dick in a Box,” which it not only posted
on YouTube but also touted as the version that could not be aired on the FCC-
controlled broadcast television. This move showed how corporations like NBC
were attempting to capture the same sort of success realized by independent viral
video producers and they were working within a rhetoric of “the director’s cut.”