Home : Networking : News

Social networking gets the TV bug

With competition between the leading social networking sites becoming fierce, services such as MySpace are moving into the online broadcast world to attract an audience, and compete against a whole new set of foes.

By Martine Schroeder, 2 Jul 2007 at 22:28

gallery

Despite precautions put into place by YouTube to lessen the number of videos that infringe copyrights, for example the rule that videos must be under 10 minutes length, there are still a number of videos taken off the site each day because of copyright infringements. Some countries, such as Brazil and Morocco have even banned YouTube for various reasons.

Although copyright infringement is an issue and concern, video sites are doing a lot for the promotion of the products posted on their site. Some companies such as Viacom is not open to this type of promotion, while Sony on the other hand is embracing this type of free online promotion.

"One of the good things is that it [the brands] gets seen if it's on YouTube," Delaney said.

Video streaming is beginning to become one of the dominant forms of home entertainment and whatever is on it gets seen quickly and by many people. Television shows, music videos, and self-generated entertainment can all be found on one simple machine - the computer, and people are beginning to go to that more and more for their entertainment source whether it is copyright infringed or not.