Viacom Demands YouTube Remove Stephen Colbert Videos

Last summer, Stephen Colbert's show on Comedy Central, Colbert Report, ran a wacky and funny segment about how long it would take ten monkeys to type the bible.

During the fall of 2006, a website was named after the "monkey segment" as a blog portal featuring the best of weird, bizarre and unusual news, videos and pictures on the Internet.

Due to the wild success of Colbert Report, YouTube members were posting segments from the show almost daily, including popular segments such as "The Word" or the hilarious "Better Know A District," in which Colbert has made a mockery of, and humiliated, numerous Congressional representatives in one of the most talked about series of political interviews of the past year.

The question is: Why did YouTube, by then a part of Google, take down the video of that segment from the show?

Apparently, Viacom has contacted YouTube and demanded that they remove all Viacom programming from the YouTube website.

So far, it looks like Viacom's threat is working.

In fact, I found a Viacom video of a Colbert Report segment posted yesterday, and it had already been removed minutes later, with a red box on the page that the video was removed for potential copyright issues (be careful how you word that guys).

It must be that Viacom execs want people to go to the Comedy Central website to watch segments of the Colbert Report and any other Viacom-owned programming.

That makes total sense when you think about brand loyalty, marketing and advertising dollars, but is it a wise overall strategy to not allow fans of Viacom programming to post video segments on the wildly popular YouTube?

Perhaps Viacom views YouTube and companies like Google as a long-term threat to traditional broadcasting, which has been already happening for the past decade, especially as the trends in breaking news delivery, community journalism, blogging and instant access to news and information in seconds become the norm for news and entertainment consumers of all ages and backgrounds.

You can't blame Viacom for taking action when you also consider just how quickly Google and YouTube have become household words - without virtually any advertising. Now that's cost effective.

Google itself has become so common that it is now a verb as well ("to Google a friend") and President Bush made sure to create his own pronoun (Bushism #13,484 and counting) when he answered a reporter's question about using Google with the comment: "I've used The Google."

The president said he liked the satellite maps (Google Earth) because he could look at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. (We can't wait until you get back to the ranch permanently too, Georgie boy.)

So now that fans of Comedy Central cannot watch segments from shows on YouTube, fans of the Colbert Report will now need to go to Comedy Central to watch segments from his show if available (anyone who has tried to watch Colbert or John Stewart of the Daily Show have found to be either inaccessible due to server overload or just really slow).

The difficulty in accessing Viacom's site and the lack of user input as to the video contents is probably a couple of good reasons why they should reconsider and allow segments to be posted with some restrictions.

There may be other sites out there that are hosting these segments (and at this point I'd say at their own peril per this report), but a preliminary search on a number of search engines didn't turn up anything worthy.

My web logs also show that many visitors were clicking a link on the homepage ("How This Site Was Named") that redirected them to an address where there was the famous monkey segment which got thousands of hits on YouTube. In January, Viacom ordered YouTube to take the video down.

Well isn't that interesting? I assume you said yes, so I'll tell you why you said yes:

There are literally hundreds of videos from the Colbert show hosted on YouTube. Colbert himself joked about this very fact on his show back in November, demanding he receive 1/3 of the $1.3 billion Google paid for YouTube. That video segment is still up on YouTube.

Here's another twist: Sometime in the past week or so, YouTube changed the message on the page from "Viacom" to "third party." Interesting as well. Anyone have any insight into this matter?

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