Can Viacom Build Its Own YouTube?
Last week, Viacom pulled all its clips from YouTube (taking down some innocent bystanders along the way). Many of us felt this wasn’t a particularly useful strategy, in that other broadcasters had begun to realize how useful YouTube is as a promotional vehicle. However, today reports are coming out that the reason Viacom did this was that it’s about to launch its own video site that includes plenty of YouTube-like features, such as the ability to embed the content onto another website (such as someone’s blog). That certainly does make the removal of clips from YouTube somewhat less painful, and may give more support to the idea that Viacom can do more if they manage the content itself — but that might not necessarily be true. In hosting all the content itself, Viacom faces a few problems. First of all, now it needs to pay for bandwidth (and that can be pretty expensive). For all the talk from some about how YouTube gives nothing back to its users, people seem to forget how expensive i
