The New York Daily News has a great article on YouTube, online video and professional sports that is worth checking out. They say that while unedited fan footage can sometimes provide for amusing clips, sometimes the unedited professional ones also go along way to being fodder for the YouTube machine. Case in point: Chase Daniel a football player for Missouri was caught eating his own boogers — now notoriously known as a booger eater because the clip was uploaded to YouTube.
But it looks like with copyright and partnership deals with major television studios — particularly ones that broad cast those games — and the predilection of Google to take down videos on masse at the mere hint of litigation, only some of those vast library of sports video is making its way to YouTube.
Major League Baseball, for example, has its own proprietary video delivery system that is under a strict subscription model: $80 for the year or $15/ month. On the other hand, its video library is extensive and all games of all teams are available for perusal — pretty amazing.
The National Hockey League and the NBA, however, are going with a free searchable video service, albeit one that is still a work in progress.
Will professional sports leagues and the media companies that are responsible for their TV rights and syndication cherry pick their video clips that they give to YouTube? Or will we see a future where more and more stuff moves to their respective proprietary websites and formats? I think its far too early to tell — but I certainly think its a wise idea for these sports teams to keep some video in their back pocket. After all, if the cachet of YouTube ever fell (and who knows — it might), at least they’ll have some unique and valuable footage left for their own sites
