Major Labels Say That Content ID Not Effective Enough

The 3 major labels are furthering their attack on YouTube, the platform they love to hate.

With licenses up for renewal soon, the majors are trying their best to gain some leverage in the negotiation, so they have filed a submission to the US Copyright Office claiming that YouTube's Content ID is ineffective in identifying uploads using content illegally using their copyrights a great deal of the time.

Content ID is YouTube's secret sauce in that it's the content recognition technology that allows the copyright holder to identify and monetize unauthorized uploads of copyrighted material.

Universal Music Publishing claims that it fails to identify as much as 40% of its compositions, according to an article in the Financial Times.

YouTube, of course, claims that Content ID is successful 99.5% of the time. Even if that were true, 0.5% still represents hundreds of thousands of unlicensed uploads, so there's a lot of money being left on the table.

Ultimately, the labels would like the 55/45 revenue split with YouTube to be increased, since all other music streaming platforms are in the 70+% range. YouTube has little incentive to change, however, since even if the labels pull their licenses, the user generated uploads will continue, so the label's vast catalog of music will still remain on the platform.

If it's true that Content ID doesn't catch 40% of the unauthorized uploads, that only puts YouTube in a stronger negotiating position. One should never bet against the major labels in a negotiation, but in this case, my money is on YouTube coming out on top.

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Facebook Finally Launches Its Version Of Content ID

Content creators have been complaining for months that many of their YouTube videos have been showing up on Facebook posted by someone else - an action called "freebooting."

In an effort to alleviate the situation, Facebook has now officially launched its version of YouTube’s Content ID called Rights Manager. 

This is an admin tool for Facebook Pages that lets them upload video clips, then monitors Facebook news feeds for copies of these videos that might be later illegally posted to Facebook. It can then either automatically report them as violations to be deleted or notify the original publisher.

Rights Manager allows copyright owners to set up whitelists of Pages that are allowed to distribute their videos, and upload unpublished videos they don’t want anyone else using even if they haven’t posted them themselves.

It will also show what Page posted a video, how many views it has gotten, and sort alerts about freebooting by these parameters, too.

Live videos can be monitored as well, which is designed to prevent people from rebroadcasting pay-per-view TV content like boxing matches, which has become a huge issue that has put Periscope in the television industry's crosshairs.

Rights Manager isn’t available to all Facebook users yet, although content owners can now apply for access.

Interestingly, there's been no discussion about monetizing Facebook videos yet, although it seems like only a matter of time now that Rights Manager is in place.

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Facebook Finally Cracking Down On Video Pirates

Facebook has really been pushing its video service as a real challenge to YouTube, but it's failed in a couple of big areas - monetization and piracy. Now it looks like the service is finally rolling out a system to at least take care of the pirates.

On YouTube, if someone is using your video or music without permission, a technology known as Content ID sniffs it out and notifies the copyright holder. The channel using the video or song without permission is then given 2 choices - either taking the video down or allowing advertising to be placed on the video, of which most of the income will go to the content owner.

This is how money is made on YouTube. Not so much on the video you post, but on the many others that repost it virally.

Unfortunately Facebook hasn't had any method of doing that - until now.

The service is rolling out what it calls a "video matching technology" that will let content owners tell Facebook that a video clip belongs to them.

This is an important first step to monetization, which is crucial if Facebook wants to give YouTube a run for its money.

Facebook says that it now fields more than 4 billion daily video views, but some estimate that as many as 70% are videos that were illegally lifted from YouTube. Now there's a way for the original posters to begin to take advantage of what Facebook has to offer.

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A Look At Facebook's Big Video Problems

At over 4 billion video views a day, Facebook now claims that more people watch videos on the platform than on YouTube.

That figure may be deceiving however, as it's come to light that the social network has a much less stringent method of valuing a view than YouTube does.

For instance, Facebook counts almost anything as a view, regardless of how long a person watches, or even if they watch with the sound off.

YouTube doesn't count a view as a "view" until around the 30 second mark, or a sufficient amount of time has past to signal real engagement.

As you can imagine, this has lead both creators and advertisers to look at Facebook video views as far less valuable than on YouTube.

Another major problem for the network is that it has no way of monetizing a video, so a content creator with millions of views won't earn a penny. Even worse, there's no Content ID-like system akin to YouTube where you can monitor if anyone else is using your copyrighted material.

The one thing Facebook Video does have going for it is that it currently favors videos over all other content, and therefore pushes it out to 100% of your following, as compared to posts, which currently are seen by 2 to 3% if you don't pay to promote it.

Facebook is too large and too smart to let these problems stand for long, so look for either workarounds or true fixes soon. In the meantime, don't take the view count too seriously.

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The Upcoming YouTube Music Showdown

YouTube multichannel networks (MCNs) like Maker, Machinima, and Fullscreen have reshaped the business of online video, but there's still one dicey area that hasn't yet been worked out to everyone's satisfaction - the music that accompanies many of those videos.

It's about to get interesting in that regard as music library Freeplay Music recently filed a lawsuit against some of the largest MCNs in the business.

Disney's Maker Studios, DreamWorks Animation's Awesomeness, Big Frame and BroadbandTV where all slammed with suits that claimed the unauthorized use of Freeplay's music in videos on their channels.

Not satisfied with YouTube's Content ID system of spotting music usage, Freeplay incorporated its own digital fingerprinting technology called TuneSat to discover what it claims was rampant unauthorized use of its music.

The company offers free licenses to video producers to use its music for non-commercial purposes, and that's the rub. In a countersuit, the MCNs have claimed that Freeplay is being deceptive with their licenses, getting a producer to use its music for free only to turn around later and demand payment.

The problem with all this is that the MCNs are responsible for policing their own copyright situations, but you could see how difficult this could be with thousands of channels and millions of videos, which is why Freeplay went to the fingerprinting system to more precisely determine for sure if its music was being used.

YouTube has been like the Wild West for a number of years when it came to music licensing, but now that everyone is aware huge amount of the money involved, it's finally gotten the attention of everyone in music publishing in a big way. Whichever way the lawsuit turns out, it can only be good for songwriters, as every little income stream is now so important.

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Twitch Launches New Free Music Library For Games

Gamers really love Twitch, the leading video platform and community that allows them to broadcast, watch and chat about gaming. Many even consider it the center of the esports industry. That said, it's a huge platform that's somewhat underground unless you're an active gamer.

A big problem that viewers have had is that many times the audio in a gaming video would be muted because of the copyright laws regarding the music. In other words, a video of someone playing a game would violate the music copyright of the game because the video didn't have the rights to play it.

Needless to say, watching a video without the sound isn't remotely the same experience so Twitch has done something about it by making a library of 500 royalty-free songs available to play when that situation occurs.

The library leans towards EDM and features songs from both Skrillex and Steve Aoki's record labels as well as many indie labels. Aoki already has a relationship with Twitch, having performed the platform's first live concert in 2014.

Twitch, which is now owned by Amazon, plans to make music more prominent in the future by adding a new Music category for performances, and has even entered into an agreement with Beatport to host a channel.

YouTube went through a similar a similar problem with its Content ID feature before granting blanket licenses from major labels to video creators, and Twitch now hopes that the library will get around the same problem just as seamlessly.

Using YouTube's Audio Library

Click To Enlarge

YouTube has become quite the profit center, thanks to the Content ID feature that determines if someone is using one of your songs on a video. You then have the ability to either force the video to be taken down, or monetize it (and you keep all the money). Until recently, the problem was that most YouTube users didn't know what songs were available or what might happen if they used them before they uploaded their video.

That's all changed as the platform's Audio Library now allows someone to check on the availability and consequences of using a song on their video before they even make the video.

The video library now offers a array of free songs and sound effects, as well as outlines the availability of popular songs.

As you can see from the screen shot the left, the Library now shows in what territories an ad-supported popular song is available, if you can monetize the video or not (which is usually never), and the current popularity of the video.

For the free category, you have the option of hearing the song, searching by genre, mood, instrument or genre.

If you want to check out your own music, just put the song or artist name in the search box.

The Audio Library can be found by going to Creator Studio, then looking under the Create category.