Viacom is missing the point…

BY: BRADY GILCHRIST  |  Online Marketing

…but first a history lesson.

I’ve always said that the music industry got what it deserved when they ignored the consumer behavior shift created with by original Napster. We (the people who buy stuff) wanted easier access to content. The record industry ignored this seachange and have been whining about revenues ever since. The only people to blame were those in charge at the time - management blew it . Now the industry takes it out on consumers by using thuggish legal tactics via the RIAA - shame - keep suing grandmothers - we are all paying attention to that - seriously we are. You should be inventing not defending the model is done. Call off the RIAA and get people file sharing again because it’s the only way to find the efficiencies of scale you will need to profit in a long-tail world. Old-schoolers don’t fear you may not grow old alone there appears to be company on the way.

Viacom launched a suit against Google for a billion dollars for copyright infringement. They claim that over 160,000 videos were on display without permission. This is most likely true. The problem is that Viacom is blind to the new reality of consumer driven entertainment. The content in question was online because everyday folks put it there. Your audiences ripped your content and transfered it into a mechanism that would present it as a form of ondemand entertainment. They did this because YOU did not. Consumers are telling you that they wish to consume content in new and innovative ways. Customers have become way more complex in their consumption patterns than the media conglomerates are willing to accept or actually comprehend. Consumers have told you what they desired 160,000 times and you are not listening. Are you so traditional that you can’t see a massive opportunity in front of your eyes. Taking the content away will only compound your problems - you will drive the activity underground or worse you will open the door for a competitor with more vision. Remember business school? Specifically that lesson about “Power in the Channel”. Viacom are you willing to risk the billions required to reinvent a globally distributed consumer activity. If the answer is yes then stay the course and try to starve YouTube of content.

If you’re not sure you can stomach that much risk then we suggest you redirect some of your legal funding into an R&D think tank and come up with ways of monetizing this new reality and fast. The record industry tells us that their losses are in the billions - there is no time to waste, is there? We have some ideas if your interested. I image you will get a pretty good concession out of all this suing stuff and it will feel like a victory but a decade from now you will look back and realized that is was nothing of the sort. Ask the music industry what they might do differently if they could travel back to 1999.