Breakthroughs for Companies Embracing the Net

This week’s announcement that Warner Music has licensed its videos to YouTube is somewhat astonishing, considering how backward the industry has been in embracing the web and new forms of delivery for its content. Here’s the take from MSNBC:

Warner Music has agreed to make its library of music videos available to YouTube, marking the first time that an established record company has agreed to distribute its content through the user-generated media company.

Under the agreement, YouTube users will have full access to videos from Warner artists like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Madonna. They will also be permitted incorporate material from those videos into the clips that they create and upload to YouTube. Warner and YouTube will share advertising revenue sold in connection with the video content.

Combine this with the news that Disney has made US $1 million in profits from sales of its 125,000 movies in the first week its movies were offered by iTunes:

Iger told a conference of analysts the company expects to take in $50 million in added revenue during the first year of the iTunes movie download program, which was unveiled by Apple on Sept. 12.

Wow. What a concept: offer them reasonably priced content and they will come? I don’t want to own the DVDs for all the Babylon 5 episodes, but I might buy electronic versions of them for a reasonable price. And letting people use snippets of video or music in an amateur production, that will in turn publicize your products, which will lead to more interest and possibly downloads, just makes sense. Do I hear long tail anyone? This is so much smarter than sueing people. Now, when will I be able to download a high-def version of the movies I want??????