video | the matt roberts blog

July 5, 2007

Peekvid being sued… daily motion? nope.

I’ve been following the saga of Peekvid for a number of months on this site.I regularly see my post on peekvid get a random bunch of google searches towards the weekend and then it disappears until saturday.So after a year it comes as bit of a surprise that Peekvid is now being sued. Question being: What took so long? (BTW thanks to Simon Tew for the heads ups.)Under DMCA Peekvid might have safe harbour provisions; unless it can be proven they were actively using third party servers to pirate the shows they had. Complicity in pirating removes the safe harbour provisions.Its a bit funny that MPAA is going after only Peekvid. While other people sue Youtube. DailyMotion and Veoh the major sources of all content on Peekvid have been given a pass, while DailyMotion is located in France, Veoh is an American Corporation.Why aren’t they being sued?

June 2, 2007

Building your company on the back of other peoples Piracy.

One of my most popular posts was one I did over a year ago on Peekvid a popular link site where people could find TV Shows for streaming rather than go to the trouble of Bit torrent or other P2P applications. The site itself has safe harbor protections by merely linking to the pirated videos, it was linking to youtube and google video initially for its hosted content.That changed when youtube became more assertive in taking down copyrighted materials. Google video has also followed suit.The new provider of these materials is a french company called Daily Motion who have watched their traffic follow a significant upward trend. They were also selected as Red Herrings top 100 startups in Europe. Unlike, Youtube and others, Daily Motion has a blatant amount of copyrighted material on it.Another member of the assorted video hosting companies involved in this pirated video trend is Veoh. which helps which offers a nifty unique feature:

Cross site Reporting – Not only can Veoh automatically publish videos to YouTube, Google Video, and MySpace Video, but it also creates a one-stop dashboard to track the performance of your videos across all of those sites.

They’re also enjoying an upward trend in traffic.The two sites I know of that are feeding traffic are tv-links.co.uk and the original Peekvid.com (which has fallen of significantly.)Its a pretty big assertion to say DailyMotion is that their entire business model is built on other people driving traffic to pirated videos on their websites. But I’ve only run into their site when people point me to pirated content. I wonder how they can build their business on such a shaky premise. And I wonder how long it will be before a there’s a youtube like lawsuit headed their way.

February 14, 2007

Peekvid Returns…

Thanks for the 30 ‘told you so’ emails over night! Well Peekvid is back up. Some shows haven’t made the transition yet it and the site itself seems a fair bit slower than I remember – maybe its the bugs being ironed out.I still think the ajax interface over at Channelsurfr is more slick and once it get the content up there it could be a good competitor. That said the Peekvid interface update is nicely done. They like ChannelSurfr have now moved to a combination of Youtube, DailyMotion etc.I also noticed Peekvid’s new don’t sue us disclaimer:

Peekvid does not contain any content on its site, but is merely an index of available links on the Internet. Peekvid is committed to an industry solution that will provide a mechanism to compensate artists that create the work you enjoy watching. Peekvid would like to be part of the long term solution.

Which is a bit of Baloney. Compensating just artists? ummm… sure. While you’re at it you still owe YouTUBE and DailyMotion for hosting your files – there a bits more compensation needed within this system than just going straight to Youtube. And if I were Youtube I would force users to traffic my website for commercial works like this – but I digress.Peekvid’s back up, there’s some new competition, and so its “Entertainment for all – until someone shuts it down” again.

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