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25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

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Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#311

Post by WorldMaker »

Digit-Al wrote: post #230
varunnrao wrote: post #104

What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes. It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially gi…

The worst part is that we already had a perfectly viable model: Netflix paid for the rights to everything and gave access to everybody for a reasonable monthly fee. Then the studios got greedy and thought "why should we let a middleman take a slice of our profits?" They took back the rights and started their own streaming services thinking that people would be happy to pay the same amount of money to access the tiny…

Would you really have preferred Netflix to be your monopolistic cable company raising rates all the time whenever they decided to and blaming it on a new contract with Disney or a union strike with the Writer's Guild? How much would you pay for Netflix a month before that got to be too irritating? $50? $150?

The cable companies got to do it for so long because of the natural monopolies of shared physical infrastructure. To be fair, Netflix has been a major internet infrastructure company and there are arguments to be made about their colocation and peering agreements and the natural monopolies there that gave them an early streaming edge, even if the internet in its early days decided those sort of infrastructure agreements shouldn't create or promote monopolies. But beyond that first mover advantage and with the internet's spirit that peering and colocation are regulated fairly and not monopolistically, who would have gave Netflix the right to become the internet's TV monopoly? Would you have voted for a President who made it a campaign promise to make sure that FCC Regulators declared Netflix a legal monopoly in charge of TV streaming?

Netflix only really ever had the first mover advantage, and it is probably a good thing in the eventual long term that Netflix didn't win everything. It goes that Netflix's early model while it felt "perfectly viable" from a consumer standpoint at the time was obviously not perfectly viable in the long term as a stable situation. The situation we are in now of too many streaming services and cutthroat competition between them maybe isn't sustainable in the long term and certainly doesn't feel "viable" to us as consumers. But it certainly seems more viable and preferable than the timeline where you need to send letters to your local Congress representatives in the hopes that they might legislate Netflix price increases and put FCC pressure on Netflix to serve the content they promised to serve.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#312

Post by gnicholas »

mlyle wrote: post #307
gnicholas wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, but if you gave your friend Bob a copy of the painting, he's allowed to copy that copy as much as he wants once you lose the copyright. Wouldn't this require Bob to outlive the artist by many, many years? My understanding was that copyright extends well past the death of the original creator. EDIT: I'm curious why this is downvoted. Am I incorrect about the length of copyright being decades past the death of th…

I can't downvote you, but I presume that you're being downvoted because your comment seemed to not understand the context of the thread. A. Someone proposed making copyright "use it or lose it" B. Someone else said this could have unintended consequences, like people breaking into your house to take a copy of a work where copyright has lapsed. C. I pointed out that's not how copyright works: it has nothing to do with…

Gotcha, thanks. This appeared so deep down in the thread when I commented that I didn't realize it was attached to an alternate-universe hypo above.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#313

Post by WorldMaker »

vel0city wrote: post #281
xen2xen1 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which got bought by Disney.

After the other companies largely let Hulu languish to focus on their own individual streaming platforms, yes. Disney was one of the original partners of Hulu through their ownership of ABC.

Interestingly Disney was not an original partner of Hulu and was late to the game. ABC was added several years into Hulu's history. The original partners were GE (before they sold NBC Universal to Comcast), News Corporation (Fox), and a private equity firm. That Hulu did not just become Peacock (or really that Comcast didn't need to create Peacock because it might have already majority owned Hulu in that alternate timeline) and is now a Disney property is a fascinating story in GE's mistakes, Disney's ambitions, and Hulu's seeming lack of ambitions, with a soupçon of the usual private equity meddling.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#314

Post by WorldMaker »

modeless wrote: post #101
jpk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of how trademarks work: If you don't bother to defend them, then you lose them. Maybe copyright should be the same way: If you're not distributing copies any longer, you lose the copyright protection.

A better fix would be to make copyright last 5 years from the date of publication. I'm betting that for the vast majority of copyrighted content the vast majority of the money is made in the first five years. Copyright is a tax on society. It's not an inalienable right. We keep it for the noble purpose of encouraging authors to create. We don't want them to rest on their laurels. So why are we locking up all of our c…

The US Founders' Copyright was 7 years if you filed paperwork with a chance to file paperwork for an additional 7 years.

I realize that removing the paperwork saved the Government paying for a bunch of jobs and removed a source of accidental "got ya" style mistakes of subtly misfiled paperwork. But the paperwork was also meant to help archival purposes. There was even a time that everything filed needed to send a full copy to the Library of Congress, guaranteeing at least one archival copy. (But then publishing far outpaced the Library's physical space and ability to actually archive everything.)

We have the technology to automate the jobs out of the paperwork and maybe at least the possibility to build an endowment for digital archives that don't need to worry as much about physical space, so maybe it's also time to think about bringing the paperwork back.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#315

Post by xtracto »

hannasm wrote: post #53

Free content removed by previously benevolent publisher. It's too bad they weren't able to make their free content into a profit stream. The sad part here is that they were / are a steward to something beloved by many but through copyright they take it as hostage to the grave. If they no longer find value in distributing it shouldn't they be obligated to waive their ownership? Maybe copyright itself needs some reform…

We need a new TVTorrents and EZTV equivalent site. We need some sort of distributed library with TOR like properties so that nobody can know who is ultimately storing the data.

The amount of information that is being lost is outrageous.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#316

Post by kube-system »

sytelus wrote: post #142
nutrie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say I make a painting and put it in the drawer, never to be seen again. Do I lose the copyright then and someone is permitted to come to my home and take it away? That’s just one example of possible implications. My point being, trademark is directly tied to the dynamics of the free market, while copyright only indirectly. And copyright is not forever.

I used to make this argument until I came to know of law (at least in USA) that if you don't use your house and someone else starts using your house then they can claim the legal ownership of your entire house in as little as 10 years! It was very shocking and complete antithesis of property rights in US that are so dearly held. When you think about this, in long run, it might sometimes make sense that future generat…

No, those laws are actually a recognition of property rights. Although it has become a popular social media trope to criticize things like adverse possession and "squatters" rights as some evil thing, the reason they exist is to protect people from being kicked out of their homes by others exploiting lack of or technicalities in paperwork.

Let me give you some examples of why these laws are actually good:

* Adverse possession: Imagine someone has been living and maintaining a property for 30 years. They have a single family home, and a driveway. They have a fence around all of their property, and they pay taxes on all of the area. The footprint of the property is exactly as they bought it 30 years ago. Their property is beside a piece of undeveloped, unoccupied, unmaintained land. Today, a land developer purchases the undeveloped land, and they come up with a 100 yr old document that shows that the part of the lot where their driveway is should be part of their lot. The developer then demands that the fence be torn down, and the driveway be given to them, despite the fact that the homeowner bought the property that way, has paid taxes on and maintained that property for 30 years, and nobody has brought this up as an issue in the past 100 years.

* "Squatters" (really, tenants) rights: Imagine someone rented a home in 2020. They've been paying rent every month since then, on a month-to-month basis, without a written lease. In 2024, the home was sold to an investor who wants to renovate the home and flip it. The investor wants to flip the home as quickly as possible, so they tell the tenant to leave immediately with no notice. They call the police and tell them that someone is squatting in their home. The police tell the owner that they must file for eviction, because they are not capable of determining whether the person living in the home is a "squatter" or a tenant. Only a court can do this.

Adverse possession is really just a recognition that mistakes made a long time ago shouldn't undo current realities. And "squatters rights" are really just a recognition that tenants don't have to defend their own property rights in front of a cop on their front porch at 2am on a Tuesday, they get to defend their rights to their leased property in court.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#317

Post by wiseowise »

4ggr0 wrote: post #255
wiseowise wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it interesting that I have yet to meet a single person advocating for ad blockers on YouTube who, upon being given the option to have an ad-free experience by paying for YouTube premium, choose to do so. That’s because service is a complete crap, pal. These days I’m staying solely for content released in 2015 and earlier. Why would I in the right mind support this ADHD driven, rage bait filled dump that exis…

if you think that nothing interesting or useful was posted on youtube in the last 9 years then i really wonder in what corners of the platform you're roaming around :D

I didn’t say that there’s no new quality content. It’s just platform optimized now for crapware. Just look at the top videos and YouTube shorts, cesspool.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#318

Post by vel0city »

WorldMaker wrote: post #313
vel0city wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the other companies largely let Hulu languish to focus on their own individual streaming platforms, yes. Disney was one of the original partners of Hulu through their ownership of ABC.

Interestingly Disney was not an original partner of Hulu and was late to the game. ABC was added several years into Hulu's history. The original partners were GE (before they sold NBC Universal to Comcast), News Corporation (Fox), and a private equity firm. That Hulu did not just become Peacock (or really that Comcast didn't need to create Peacock because it might have already majority owned Hulu in that alternate ti…

You're right about Disney not being original, I was wrong about that. But they became a partner two years into its existence. I don't know if I'd call that late to the game.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#319

Post by cyanydeez »

varunnrao wrote: post #104

What I find really interesting is that all these studios who ran TV channels for so many years fumbled the bag when it came to streaming.. It's like all these people who basically were in content distribution didn't really wise up to the next, new thing in their business even as it happened in front of their eyes. It's pretty wild that Paramount+/Disney+/Peacock or whatever really struggle to get going, especially gi…

Its almost like capitalism has no lngterm direcfive and is unreliable.

Re: 25 years of video clips gone as Paramount axes Comedy Central wesbite

#320

Post by lotsofpulp »

blitzar wrote: post #306
lotsofpulp wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Shari Redstone, who has 77.4% of the voting power in Paramount, just let her employees get rich at her expense? She hired them, she offered the compensation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Amusements

She paid the CEO $30 million a year to lose $30 billion in market cap (of which National Amusements share is $23 billion) in just 4 short years, so I would say that they got pretty rich at her expense.

Obviously, but your comment implied malfeasance on the part of the CEOs (“paid themselves fat bonuses”), whereas my comment illuminates you to the fact that the CEOs action’s and compensation were subject to a single owner’s approval.

That is about as market price as it gets. Also, if you dig into the proxy forms, I bet you would find those CEOs probably got paid in Paramount stock with various lockup terms before they could sell, so they probably didn’t make out as well as you think.

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