Piracy - Less Crap or More? - Ask YouTube.....

Today, MGM announces it will run movies through YouTube, thus allowing YouTube to actually monetise some of the content on its pipes (it can only advertise against about 4% of it at present). At the same time, ex BitTorrenter Ashwin Navin claims that piracy "leads to less crap". What is going on?

The YouTube play is all about getting quality content that Advertisers will subsidise onto the site - as they note:

....YouTube is trying harder to make friends with Hollywood — and emulate the appeal of Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox. Along with its MGM relationship, YouTube has recently forged ties with the independent studio Lionsgate and with CBS, which this month started posting to YouTube full-length episodes of older shows like “Star Trek” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”

“We believe in comprehensiveness, and we want to have deals with everybody,” said Jordan Hoffner, the director of content partnerships for YouTube. “We want to be able to give users the most content possible.”

In the last few months, YouTube has swept its virtual floors and painted its stage as it prepares to offer more professional videos. This month, it introduced a “theater view” button that expands the viewing screen and darkens the rest of the Web page for optimum viewing — a feature similar to one introduced by Hulu.

Yet Navin's view is that:

“The free flow of information and entertainment over the Internet doesn’t diminish the relevance of high value, professional entertainment at all. It does force the publishers to be more quality conscious (make fewer flops, and more hits). And the great cardinal sin in this era would be to withhold your content in exclusive deals or to be too precious with your creation. Now’s the time to be more promiscuous with your distribution strategy than before: be everywhere at once, wherever there are eyeballs you can count.”

“In the previous era, there was a lot of forgiveness when 3 or 4 companies owned every road to the consumer. Publishers could produce a crap movie or TV show and get away with it. But when there are millions of ways to get to the user, or in other words, millions of “channels” to choose from, the best entertainment presented in the most frictionless format always wins.”

So, Navin argues that piracy leads to less crap. The entertainment business now has to make stuff people actually want to listen to or watch.

Now that, post Crunch und Drang, the irrational FreeConomic funding fever is ending, are we seeing the real economics starting to emerge? Ladies and Gentlemen, take your juxtapositions.....the beginning of the Online Video Endgame (or is it the end of the Beginning Game?) is going to start shortly!