YouTube: Messed up by Verizon?
Just days before Google took legal possession of YouTube, I heard Suzie Reider, CMO, YouTube, vow that she would not let marketers go “messing up” You Tube (see “YouTube on marketers: Won’t be ‘messing it up’”).
Judging from the blogosphere reaction to YouTube’s limited, for pay, mobile distribution deal with Verizon Wireless, YouTube has reneged on the promise, big time.
The acrimony is intense:
A VC, under the sparse, but cutting, title “Lame,” writes of a content deal between two publicly-traded mega-corporations as if civil rights are being “violated”: “violates the entire ethos of YouTube, not free, not open, exclusive, no community, limited, censorship, etc, etc.
GigaOm seconds the emotion, likening a content partnership between consenting corporations to the “cunning of a Night Club bouncer, deciding when and who is allowed to cross the velvet rope.”
What have YouTube and Verizon conspired upon the “content must be free” Web 2.0 Garden of Eden?
Beginning next month, YouTube will become a commercial-free branded channel on Verizon's VCast service, which charges subscribers $15 per month to access content partners including ESPN, CNN, E! and MTV, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
What might happen next? Om Malik:
Given the billions of dollars they spent on spectrum, and building those networks, carriers want to milk their profit machine as much as they can.
Is that not the capitalist way?