As seen from the roof of my building, the hills behind the Hollywood Sign burn. This was shot just as the fire crested the hill. It looks like the crack team of firefighters and helicopters beat the fire down, but I wasn’t too sure they would succeed when I was shooting this. A strong wind was blowing east and I think the sign was in real jeopardy for a while.
[UPDATE] It’s arson.
I’m not sure I can go on…
So we should probably assume that the negotiations aren’t going well between Viacom and YouTube.
After first pissing people off by directing YouTube to remove all videos from Comedy Central (among other shows), Viacom backpedaled and said they just wanted the whole episodes removed, but they’d leave little highlight clips up (like the ones that I featured here in a whole section dedicated to Stephen Colbert). Now it appears that YouTube has gone ahead and removed ALL ALL THE GOOD Colbert clips.
Why not just grant YouTube a license for your content? Colbert, don’t even try to say that YouTube sharing of clips from your show cost you billions. I’m pretty sure that the YouTube generation made you billions…or at least a million or two. And now for some you’re a hero (and in some cases WERE a hero).
Now, you and your little friend Stewart are trying to make us feel sorry for the advertisers who pay for your show? Um… we watch the show, see the ads and thus get them their money’s worth. You wouldn’t have advertisers without US. You have the advertisers and popularity because the viral distribution of highlights of your show reached far more people than your puny Comedy Central network ever could.
And just for your foolish antics, Stephen Colbert, you’re on notice!
[UPDATE] So in reviewing the YouTube site, it appears that Viacom/Comedy Central has left over 2,000 clips on the YouTube site…many of them much, much longer than any of the clips I featured here. So what’s up with that? You remove the funny clips and leave us with the dregs?
[UPDATE 2] I’m not the only one who sees the Viacom/Colbert scam. And here, too.
[UPDATE 3] Total truthiness [via Idealog.us]
Video of Morgan Spurlock playing on the Actual Reality Pictures / FX show 30 Days. What happens to an apolitical slacker when he spends 30 days with Stephen Colbert? Classic work! A perfect bunch of Friday Laughs.
Don’t forget next Wednesday’s finale of 30 Days when Spurlock goes to jail for 30 days. It’s on FX, Wednesday, August 30th at 10PM E/P.
[UPDATE] So that whiny bitch, Stephen Colbert got his corporate cronies at Viacom to boot this video off of YouTube. Now it no longer appears here. I guess we’ll just have to use mega-network Comedy Central’s lovely website to watch the clips they select for us. What a joke. Look, Comedy Central, your show The Colbert Report would not have achieved its current level of popularity without US.
Steve Jobs, Apple, the iPod and the iTunes Music Store are definitely riding high. With over 3 million songs sold every day from the iTunes Music Store and over 32 million iPods sold in 2005, Apple finally achieved something it had never achieved before: mass-market desirability. Now the mass market is finally focused both on the sexy design of its products and on buying up as many of Jobs’ lovely inventions as fast as they possibly can. As Mike Mella’s iPodFather movie poster indicates, some feel he might have a bit too much power. And unfortunately, this honeymoon won’t last forever, dear Steve.
Competitors are knocking at Apple’s door and while it’s true that insanely great products usually triumph over poor ones, I’m worried about other products, that are just great (read Beta versus VHS etc etc), beating out the insanely great ones out in the end. When Two and a Half Men can get an Emmy-nomination, the world is still ripe for a repeat of Apple’s late-Eighties fall from grace (Could Steve Jobs become another John Scully after all?).
After all these years of using Apple’s products, it still puzzles me why they can’t seem to make any in-roads into the mega-business world or even the business world of entertainment. Sure, they sell rafts of computers to advertising agencies, graphics design houses, video editing shops and now into the scientific community, but why won’t they get serious about getting big…I mean really big?
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Colbert repudiates his Daily Show history, convinces Jon Stewart to apologize for The Daily Show and puts Stewart on notice. Classic.