Saturday, August 9, 2008

Youtube and the Olympics

I've been trying to view the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in Youtube, but so far, it's been a frustrating exercise. It seems that IOC, BOCOG and NBC are right on their toes tracking every Youtube upload that is connected to the Games. Thus, on many of the search results that come up, I frequently see the message 'This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by a third party.'

This is the first time that the Olympics is held in the Youtube era, and it will indeed be a daunting challenge for the organizers to curb uploading of Olympic-related videos, view each one, see if it meets the allowed criteria and then ask for its removal if found violating the guidelines. As it were, clips showing a slideshow of photographs from the opening ceremonies and very short clips (around a minute) are allowed to remain in cyberspace. But often, you will see a link for a video uploaded only a few hours (or even minutes) before and its already deleted - that's how quick the response is. 

Well, this is just the first day of the Games. Youtube (and other video-sharing sites) fanatics will surely devise ways to circumvent the rules in the coming days. For one, naming and tagging an upload with name/tags remotely related to the Games would work, as it seems the organizers are focused on the most likely keywords that surfers would type in the search engines. But the problem with this is its very limited and slow propagation - you have to have a huge mailing list to inform as many people as possible about the upload and it would take several days before the viral impact of this approach will get results. Still, I guess that is slightly better than having your upload taken down within minutes, reaching a much limited audience.