2008-02-16

This video is not available in your country

Dammit. As you all know I use a lot of YouTube videos in my posts. Well, about a month ago I started getting a new error message occasionally, implying that only Americans are allowed to watch certain clips. Videos can now be geographically restricted by their copyright owners, and this has happened more and more during the past month.

I could talk about the international nature of the internet, about shortsightedness in marketing and about how the effort is significantly futile (almost all videos have fan-posted copies). But what really matters to me is the fact that YouTube (which I've used as my main source of new music for almost a year) is now significantly less attractive to me as a tool. It's not as broken as, say, Pandora or MTV videos, but it's getting there and that saddens me a great deal.

I've long had a YouTube search as one of options in the FireFox search bar, and I probably use it more frequently than the other ones on there (Google, Chambers, English Wikipedia and Discogs, in case you're interested). As I post this I'm switching it to a Google Video search. Google Video used to be a prime example of a fairly evil entity, but since they bought YouTube the search function has grown to include Myspace, Dailymotion and loads of smaller alt.tubes. Plus the search algorithm is a lot better. So expect to see videos from a variety of sources on here from now on...

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm getting the message when I try to watch videos from the UK, so it implies to this American that only the British can watch.

Birdseed said...

Interesting. The videos I've tried watching have very definitely been intended only for an American audience though (based on the type of music and prevalent marketing strategies). Obviously Youtube have started Georestricting on a fairly wide scale.

Anonymous said...

Same problem 4 me! Usually happen when u try to watch music videos from "big records company"...

still no problem with the embedded vids on my blog ( www.connectdastyle.altervista.org )

bye

Anonymous said...

This hits another blow to us concerned about the rot, growing in the hearts of our freedoms. Something has to give, sometime... ?

Anonymous said...

fwiw, I'm in US and I just got the same message for a video.

Birdseed said...

Yeah, apparently there are videos georestricted to the UK as well. Not sure about other places.

In case you're not too adverse to ads, there's a piece of software that disables georestriction entirely:

http://anchorfree.com/hotspot-shield/

Birdseed said...

(Apparently only to the US though.)

Anonymous said...

This mot`herfuker video is not available in your god danm country. (and hopefully is never going to be there for you) Meanwhile, because we know you're about to explode of rage, we are going to be nice with you and let you chose one from the four shity videos below. Have a nice day ;)

Anonymous said...

I am in the UK, and can't watch music videos from British artists "This video is not available in your country."; copyright just causes everybody loads of problems!

Copyright was created to protect attribution, but now days it protects profits, rubbish!