mblog

If anyone else was gluttonously feasting on the free content buffet, offered by Peekvid, you knew that this was some gross oversight on the internet, and that it would be short lived. No rules, no payment, no data collection… no monetary value at all, aside from the skanky low value banner ads offering Paris Hilton screen savers. Within 2 weeks of my post, the site was shut down into ‘Beta’. YouTube is waging heady battles with it’s content, recently removing 100,000 user uploaded videos. What’s a freeloader to do? Take up torrents? My internet comes from an unsecured connection and for that I am throttled to the point of dial-up, and the web pirates don’t let me play for it.

Viacom (owner of American tripe like MTV, BET, Comedy Central) responded to their battles with YouTube by giving a bid at free copyrighted content from it’s network a new TV content provider, Joost. It is still in testing mode, and doesn’t have nearly the content of Peekvid, but Joost has teamed up with Skype to strengthen it’s position on the web. As our attention span is becoming shorter with different disputes and marketing cycles continually shifting, only a brief time period with will determine if their content is addictive and vast enough to hold us for longer than a month, or if it will be a new step in the momentum to monetize the internet. I am still waiting for my BETA membership to pass, I can’t wait to see the angle.