Saturday Night Live fans were treated to a special Mother’s Day collaboration from pop star Justin Timberlake and resident viral video maven Andy Samberg. But if fans wanted to share that video with others, YouTube was not on NBC’s approved sharing list.
General Electric lawyers must have been very busy Sunday with DMCA takedown notices flying at YouTube and YouTube users so fast they must have developed some sort of script just for that purpose. As of today, what used to be uploads of “Motherlover” are now notices of deletion.
It’s not that NBC doesn’t want fans to share the video with each other. The official video at Hulu, which NBC founded in a joint venture with Fox, still offers fans the ability to embed it or pass the link along. See, I can embed it here (careful, sensitive viewers, it’s dirty):
That’s okay for Murdok because we’re not YouTube. If we were YouTube, we’d have to take the video Hulu gave us and encouraged us to share right down.
It’s an interesting predicament, one supposes, to be NBC in the Internet age. Fans being able to share your content far and wide is the cheapest and most effective promotion for your shows there is—it may even encourage watching your show on an actual TV, which means bigger audiences, which means you can make more money.
Though you can’t find more potential viewers anywhere than you can on YouTube, if they’re watching on YouTube, they’re obviously not watching on Hulu.
But if that’s the case, why allow people to embed videos at all? Well, I guess one could argue the branding is still in tact when people watch it via a Hulu player. But it still seems counterintuitive to block off the biggest single source of video promotion on the Web just because you’re concerned viewers won’t know NBC produced it. It also seems to go against the very idea of viral marketing.
