One More Battle in the Viacom vs. YouTube War

Remember the Viacom vs. YouTube battle when the first company demanded the video service to remove an impressive number of videos from its page? If not, let me present you the story so far: Viacom, the owner of well-known television programs such as MTV or Comedy Central demanded YouTube to remove almost 100.000 clips from its page because the company considered that Google receives praises and money for the content provided by other publishers without paying for it. After the removal had started, Viacom made an agreement with Joost, an application developed by the founders of Skype, to assure a safe distribution of their ads.

Since the Viacom removal, YouTube started a powerful campaign to attract powerful companies and increase the number of the videos they provide. NBA, Chelsea FC and BBC were attracted by YouTube, the solution creating special channels to offer new content.

Today, Viacom Inc.'s chief executive sustained the removal of the videos published on YouTube increased the traffic of the company but made them lose an important amount of money used for advertising.

"Clips from youth-skewing shows such as Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" are understandably popular with the young demographic that YouTube attracts, Dauman said, but Google and YouTube "thought they would take it first and talk to us later." "That was hurting us," he added. "It was devaluing our core currency." A problem with YouTube, Dauman said, is that professionally produced content gets displayed side by side with homemade, and sometimes bizarre, video clips," Viacom sustained according to Los Angeles Times.

The Viacom representatives also sustained the decision to remove all the clips from YouTube's page was also taken because Google keeps the professional videos in the same place with the homemade ones, so a premium user's search was quite difficult.