On generating revenue from Control and Data

Today's WSJ and VentureBeat both report on the deal between YouTube and Warner Music to share in revenue from advertising.  This is a business development deal that helps address the copyright issues that face companies like YouTube arising from up loaded videos containing copyright content.

The WSJ article also says that YouTube "is developing an automated system to digitally identify copyrighted music and video uploaded by its users."  One way YouTube could get a kick start on the process for music would be to use the MusicIP service that I wrote about in my last article.  Their MusicDNS service can identify the music and return the name of the copyright holder - that ought to be worth a decent sized annual license fee!

I suspect that the approach that MusicIP took for music could also be expanded to video although harder to get the database of signatures primed with video content.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out - it shows the potential value of a business based on control and data.

Comments

[RisingSunofNihon]

YouTube definitely has to address the copyright issue very soon -- and come to some sort of agreement with companies besides Warner Music. I don't know about other YouTube users, but I personally only view videos such as sports highlights, montages from specific television shows, etc. In other words, it's all copyrighted stuff. I'm just not that interested in seeing John Doe barbecue in his backyard, you know? So if YouTube gets rid of all the copyrighted stuff, I wouldn't have any reason to go back there.