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Viacom Moving In Right Direction

  • GigaOM, Tuesday, February 20, 2007 11:02 AM
Prior to the big news that Viacom had signed a new content distribution deal with Joost, tech site writer Robert Young sang the praises of Viacom for boldly stepping away from Google and YouTube a few weeks ago.

The overwhelming response from most of the blogosphere is that "Viacom did a very dumb thing." Young, who professes to be mostly anti-old media for trying to extend their control over the Web as they did with traditional media, says "Viacom is doing absolutely the right thing and, in fact, they seem to be correcting themselves on many fronts."

Viacom, in moving away from another control-freak situation (i.e. Google and YouTube) has moved forward in the content wars. Trying to be MySpace is a bad idea, he says, so is partnering with the world's biggest online media company. Moving the war to a new front is the smarter choice, that is, trying to become a niche competitor. If consumers know the only place they can consume, play with and share video clips of their favorite Comedy Central shows is on ComedyCentral.com, then users will go there. If they can go anywhere else and consume Viacom content for free, the company will fail to make money from the Web.

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