Good Luck Trying to Share the Angelic Voice of Susan Boyle
by Kara Swisher
Posted on April 16, 2009 at 4:00 AM PT
Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle is indeed all she is cracked up to be.
But her virality on the Internet is not, even though she has–in fact–become an Internet sensation.
Though the performance of the unemployed 47-year-old woman–dressed in a dowdy frock, wowing the judges on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” with an astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables”–has been viewed many millions of times now and growing, it’s not easy to move it around on the Web.
It should be.
And that’s too bad for those left slack-jawed by her obvious talent, including the notorious crab-apple judge, Simon Cowell, who also judges for the similar U.S. show “American Idol.”
Her performance got a huge boost from those who heard about it and watched it on the Internet, especially on the huge Google (GOOG) video service, YouTube.
But anyone who wants to do anything more than send a link to the video of Boyle singing on YouTube, most specifically, embedding it in posts, is out of luck.
That feature has been fully disabled on every YouTube version of the clip I looked at, with the note, “Embedding disabled by request.”
It’s ironic that YouTube gets intense copyright religion right when the video of a singing human angel goes viral.
So most people are watching the show’s seven-minute clip of Boyle on its official YouTube channel, which has gotten 11.4 million views so far.
But, thankfully, YouTube is not the only choice out there.
I finally grabbed one from DailyMotion, which has a ton of embeddable ones, such as the one below:
Comments
Dear Eric Schmidt @ Google/ YouTube and traditional media bosses,
Isn’t this a wake up call for traditional media and Google
(Based on my new suggested advertising model – ‘SENSATION MEDIA’ – as highlighted by Britain’s Got Talent’s Susan Boyle this weekend!)
See article at http://tinyurl.com/cghfbe
JS
Posted by Jan Simmonds at April 16th, 2009 at 5:09 amFor every new technology that springs up to keep people from making local copies a dozen spring up to circumvent it.
I have a feeling if sites like DailyMotion ever threaten the big players they will be sued out of existence.
Google is caught in the middle. They want to be upstanding and have the same media deals as Hulu, but they don’t want to offend all the “community” members they bought into with Youtube.
I really think they would have been better off letting Youtube continue to be anarchy and instead groomed Google Video to be the choice for verified feature-length content. Trying to blend the two is a disaster waiting to happen. By trying to capture both user-sets in the same place, they may end up losing both.
Posted by Mac Beach at April 16th, 2009 at 5:46 pmAmazing story, amazing voice.
Posted by Mike Ben at April 18th, 2009 at 5:10 amSign the petition :
http://www.petition.fm/petitions/susanboyle/
The reality is that embedding the video, while increase video views, doesn’t give Youtube the page views needed to drive pageviews for its display ads.
I think protecting copyrights is the last thing on their minds.
Darren
Posted by Darren Yan at April 19th, 2009 at 7:53 am