YouTube channel down but not out!

After months of hard work, care full administration and a growing fan base, YouTube pulled our channel with absolutely no warning.

Why …………………….!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No warning. Nada, zip, didley squat! I was expecting at least an email, coupled with a reason and who we could protest against.

In discussions with major studio its come to our attention that there are people who sit in various legal and accounting departments that actively complain every time a trailer appears on Youtube when it falls outside of the normal syndication. The guys we work with (our UK represntitives in the various distribution companies) hate it, as it means that they can’t even seed their own campaigns online virally without someone from their own company pulling the trailer!

This is a classic example of Internet Illogic. Why would promotional material that is helping to promote your product, that has the potential to go viral, that is syndicated by a variety social networking and vodcasting sites and that will get more people watching the trailer, talking about it and hopefully pushing them one further step down the buying process toward buying the movie ticket or renting the DVD; be deemed by some bean counter somewhere as a threat?

Lawyers and accountants are an odd bunch. I remember hearing  a funny story from a friend of mine who told me about the music industry’s battle over international music rights and the early days of inflight entertainment. It became so wildely illogical that the London to Newyork service was forced to turn off the entertainment system while the plane flew over Iceland (a then unsecured territory).

Based on rough guess we have excluded certain film companies content from our new film trailer channel, while we go forward in making contact with various legal departments  to ask for syndication rights. We have resurrected our youtube channel which is under construction here and will be live with content shortly. Viva the free dissemination of promotional content on the Internet!

Testing out the new YouTube channel

In developing new channels and services we have been in contact with a series of social network providers and video aggregating platforms. We have contacted Youtube, Splash Cast, Metacafe, Daily Motion amongst many others to discuss promoting our our film trailer our streaming XML feeds and the responce so far has been extremely encouraging. We are hoping to land some kind of major deal soon to provide a variety of video channels to a large network provider. In the meantime we have been testing platform and I must say I really like the way the YouTube platform is set up and the way it delivers content. The player interface is a little primitive but the upload CMS is relatively robust and simple to use. I am currently exploring the syndication options for automatic uploads to Google video, you tube as well as syndicating to wordpress and I am looking forward to hopefully having this running soon.