Studios Not Sure Whether Web Video Innovator Is Friend or Foe
In an online world awash with amateur videos of pratfalls and stupid pet tricks, who could help but notice Natalie Portman's gangsta rap on YouTube?
The Harvard-educated star pulls a hoodie over her pixie haircut and busts into a bleep-filled rhyme about a day in her life, delivered Snoop Dogg-style. The skit -- which uses Portman's clean-cut image as its comedic foil -- is the edgy, irresistible stuff that exemplifies the Internet's emergence as an entertainment medium.
But it didn't originate on YouTube; it was a sketch from NBC Universal's "Saturday Night Live."
Portman's skit wasn't a mere technological blip. In recent months, episodes of "The Simpsons," Jon Stewart's gay cowboy montage from the Academy Awards ceremony and another "SNL" piece, known as "Lazy Sunday," have found their way onto YouTube, a Web community created as a place to share and watch original video shorts.
In the four months since it launched, YouTube has become a full-blown Internet tsunami. It streams about 35 million videos a day and attracts an audience of more than 9 million people a month, according to Web measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings.
That makes it more popular than Google, Yahoo or AOL's video services. The company plans to eventually convert the traffic to advertising revenue.
YouTube also illustrates the conundrum facing the entertainment industry as it struggles to control the online distribution of its television shows, movies and other types of content. Unlike Internet file-swapping services such as Napster and Kazaa, YouTube doesn't tout itself as a place to steal other people's stuff.
By all accounts, it acts like a responsible corporate citizen when asked to remove copyrighted works.
That leaves the studios internally conflicted about how to deal with YouTube, with lawyers sending threatening letters alleging infringement even as other executives contemplate how to exploit its ability to reach a young, tech-savvy audience that is growing up in front of a computer screen instead of a TV.
"We look at sites like YouTube and, for that matter, a multitude of other online options as just that -- new options that we look to embrace," said Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.'s senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy. "We look to embrace it, but not at the expense of infringing copyright."
