Answer Guy Central

Ever wonder how your favorite television programs come to be on Hulu? Think about it: the studios that own the rights to those shows don’t like giving them away. They sell episodes on iTunes, they sell DVD collections of their programming, and they sell advertising on the networks that carry the programs, so why give away programming and let Hulu have their content for free?

The truth is, they don’t. When you watch a program on Hulu it carries advertising. Hulu sells those ads and some of the revenue from them goes to the owners of the programs.

It’s Coopetition at its best. And last week Comedy Central decided they didn’t want to play the coopetition game any more. They’ve pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report from Hulu. You can still watch the programs for free over the Internet, but now you’ll have to come directly to the Comedy Central website.

Just as putting the programs on Hulu was a business change, media companies taking the shows back and selling their own advertising is a business change, too. Wasn’t that fast?

It makes sense for big companies to do this. Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, one of the largest media companies in the world. They have a sales force in place, so why pay Hulu to sell ads (the question is rhetorical)?

Remember, though, that Comedy Central produces their own programming. One company makes the show, owns it, and broadcasts it over their network.  Generally, networks buy the right to air programming produced by others, who retain ownership rights and need companies like Hulu to do sales at the next level.

Business Change is situational, and often time-constrained. The people who watch Comedy Central’s programming might not like having to make an extra stop to find it, but going to another website is really no different than changing channels on your television. And Comedy Central wants you to program them in directly.

Let us keep you up on these business change issues without having to make an extra stop at Answer Guy Central. You can have updates sent to you automatically through the Answer Guy Central iPhone App, or  the Answer Guy Central RSS Feed.

A few days ago, and with no notice at all, Google deleted a handful of blogs. <POOF!> Gone. Just like that.

Most of the attention to this has focused on what those blogs did; they were repositories for music, and while there were reviews attached (for example) to legitimize the blogs’ purpose, they were in fact making copyrighted materials available without the permission of the copyright holders.

And that, as you know, is generally not legal.

There’s a very small piece of me that finds the debate and protest against Google’s action fascinating. And it’s a huge protest; search Twitter for #Musicblogocide2K10 to see (Or Google itself once Twitter’s history expires). I’ve covered various aspects of music and movie piracy a few times (see here and here)  and how studios are taking more successful steps to get us to pay for Movies and Television on the Internet.

But ultimately Google did what they had to do; faced with a take-down notice from the RIAA and not wanting to fight a legal battle that they’d eventually lose and wouldn’t benefit from either way, they capitulated.

The issue is what protection the blog writers have from Google acting this way. The thin complaint that’s being offered is that Google deleted those blogs without notice or giving the people who wrote them a chance to respond to the RIAA take-down requests.

And now the Internet gets interesting: Who Owns Your Web Site?

Not being an attorney, I don’t have an opinion that means enough to offer. I’ve been in the media business and other businesses for quite a while and understand a lot about things like copyrights and trademarks, and I’m a firm believer that common sense, applied carefully, will often obviate the need for an attorney. But as President Bill Clinton proved when he uttered that famous phrase “it depends on what you think ‘is‘ is”, a word like “ownership” is not as simple as it seems.

There’s no question that the things the bloggers write belong to them. And while it’s more difficult to answer clearly, a question about the “look and feel” of their web sites would also be answered with “that’s theirs”. Similarly, the “work product” you create belongs to you.

But the music being hosted belonged to someone else. Someone with deep pockets and a demonstrated propensity to sue anyone who uses their product without permission. And Google’s position? THEY WERE GIVING AWAY THE SPACE THOSE BLOGS WERE HOSTED ON.

Simple concept, friends: when you do business with someone, make sure you are actually doing business with them. Free almost always means “they have no obligation to do anything for you, and you have no real recourse”.

Are you storing documents on your free Google Docs account? You can believe that Google will protect the things you keep on their servers, but other than Google having said they plan to keep doing so you have no leverage if they stop providing the service or start charging for it. And you’re sure not gonna sue Google if they change their minds.

For goodness sake—more important, for your sake and to gain some protection against a very ugly business change—don’t host your web site for free. There are many inexpensive places we can place your Internet presence, and I mean truly inexpensive.

It’s your business, and if you want your business web site to stay yours, we know some very simple ways to insure that.

Umm, No.

So last week, AOL’s latest CEO Tim Armstrong started talking about some plans afoot at the once-and-never-again online activity leader. And I’m glad to see that Tim has a plan.

And it isn’t going to work.

The good news: Mr. Armstrong has quite the media pedigree. Seriously, this guys the real deal, experience-wise. The bad news: this is the same plan AOL used in the 1990s. It created mediocre content then, and will do something even worse now. It is not business change.

AOL used to produce their own content and hoped people would buy/follow it. “Buy” is a reference to the position AOL once held as huge (paid) ISP to the non-tech-savvy masses, and “follow it” is about AOL’s total control over what appeared on their closed service.

The other thing AOL did was license content, and pay pretty solid commissions. I wrote IYM Software Review between 1989 and 1995, and in the final four years of that period watched both my readership and income soar under a deal with AOL. And then they proposed cutting what they paid me by 99%. And so I discovered the Internet

Back in the day content producers were on staff (or in the case of IYM contracted) and well-enough paid to be controlled . What is AOL going to offer content producers today?

So that’s the bad news. While business change can sometimes be repackaging of old ideas, this is an idea with nothing behind it. Journalists and media producers are paid less and less as the number of choices increases, and AOL is not going to magically create enough mass to get folks to write for them exclusively without paying them; and they can’t afford that.

Silk Purse/Sow’s Ear, understand?

I’m all about business change. This isn’t it.