Video hosting and sharing

Overview

Video hosting and sharing, which the digital age has now connected and converged, are historically and actually two discrete things. Video hosting is a service provided by a website or Internet-based platform that allows video content to be made available to other viewers besides the originator/owner of that video content. These other users may be the public at large, or, if the video is password protected or otherwise marked private, with a smaller group of invited viewers or subscribers. File sharing was one of the original functions of the Internet as it was developed in the late 1960s as ARPANET. It is helpful to think of video hosting sites as storage hubs for large files that are accessed across the Internet by individual users who visit the site to view the video but who cannot download the video file nor access it separately from the site on which it is hosted.

Video sharing as an anthropological and social act predates the digital revolution and the Internet and can be discussed in the context of the home video era. During this period (roughly the mid-1970s through the early 2000s, when DVR technology and DVDs replaced video cassettes) video content was shared via viewer-made VHS tapes, which might be "home movies" of family events recorded on a camcorder or copies of commercially released motion pictures or television shows. In this period, despite a loss of quality as subsequent generations of video copies were made, friends, family or coworkers informally shared video content via VHS tapes.

The documentary Winnebago Man (2010) chronicles the journey of video outtakes of a particular salesperson's performance in 1980s corporate videos for the recreational vehicle maker. VHS tapes of Jack Rebney, aka the Angriest Man in the World, swearing when he forgot his lines and raging about and against the script he is having to read about Winnebago's new product line, circulated informally between the mid-1980s and mid-2000s, at which time they were posted to YouTube. This took them from an informal video sharing network of friends and friends of friends who worked on the shoots to a national and international audience who visited the video hosting site and then engaged in video sharing via their social networks. Thus Winnebago Man chronicles and historicizes the act of video sharing as it moves from an interpersonal and community-based social activity based in the circulation of an artifact to the depersonalized and anonymized social network world of the web based on the circulation of metadata that directs or points others to the place where the video content can be consumed.

In the digital, Web 2.0 media environment, video hosting and video sharing are inextricably intertwined and the terms are often used interchangeably to denote the posting of video content to a web-based platform and the subsequent access to that video by others, who then distribute and publicize the video to still others. Thus, both activities can be categorized as web-based video distribution systems (Curtin, Holt & Sanson, 2014). Video hosting sites, however, are different from other websites in that they are dedicated to hosting video. Examples of popular video hosting sites are YouTube, Vimeo, and blip.tv, which, while accessible from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, are the most popular U.S. video hosting sites. Other countries and regions of the world have their own video hosting sites that surpass these giants in regional usage such as Bilibili in China or Dailymotion for EU countries.

Video sharing, even when conflated with video hosting (YouTube is often and not necessarily incorrectly referred to as a "video sharing" site) is, in its most strict definition, the activity of circulating or distributing a video to others via the Internet. Video sharing often takes place via social networks such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Instagram. Videos shared on these sites are usually downloaded or streamed by following a URL to a file on a video hosting site; the link either redirects the user to the video hosting site or, if properly embedded in the post, plays the video within the social media window using a dedicated player. This is generally preferred, as it keeps the user within the particular social media ecosystem on which the video was shared.

Video sharing is arguably one of the most common activities in which social media users engage. In this way, video sharing is related to and crucial to the concept of "virality" (sometimes called "spreadability"), which refers to the circulation of content in a Web 2.0 world (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2018). Videos being shared fall under many categories (Kim, 2012) from content illegally "ripped" from DVDs, DVRs, or live TV video streams to old digitized VHS tapes to content created by aspiring television and filmmakers to marketing content produced specifically for the platform. Amateur content also abounds, ranging from family reunions and vacations to pet videos and how-to demonstrations. The ubiquity of cellphone cameras capable of shooting high-quality video and the ability to immediately upload this footage to YouTube or Vimeo via mobile broadband internet access has expanded the amount of user-generated content exponentially (Tripp, 2012).

These activities, however, are not resource- or revenue-neutral for video hosting sites. YouTube, owned by Google, places ads against all of its popular content, in some cases allowing users to skip an ad after 5 seconds, and in others, requiring the viewer to sit through a 15-second pre-roll ad that cannot be fast forwarded. Vimeo makes money off of subscription accounts that are required to host large amounts of video and/or to gain access to robust SEO and tagging tools. When amateur content does go "viral" in a way that generates many hits, YouTube, not the owner of the amateur content decides advertising rates, as well as whether or not to share this revenue with the owner via a partner contract. YouTube also decides what content does and does not fit within its Terms of Service and maintains a fairly opaque appeals process for YouTubers who have had content removed.

The uses of YouTube for video distribution of varying types has far outstripped any clear ability to create a taxonomy of content or usage, which makes it (and all video sharing platforms) difficult to police and results in a lack of control over distribution by the video content producer and owner (Hassanabadi, 2011). There are, however, video producers who, due to the nature of the content they create, have found themselves able to financially benefit from video hosting and paywalled sharing systems without rogue competition or reposting. Among the largest video hosting and pay-sharing sites in the world are subscription-only pornography sites such as PornHub, which, due to their adult content (which violates the terms of service of non-paywalled sharing sites), are still able to rely upon claims of exclusivity to enhance their subscriber base. In this way the content of the video shared can dictate the economic structure of the hosting company and technology.

Further Insights

One of the problems with the terminology used and the differences between video hosting and video sharing (if, to be honest, there are any substantial or meaningful ones) is that video hosting and sharing are conflated in the minds and activities of the users. Therefore it may, in fact, make sense to conflate the two terms or combine them to talk about YouTube as a "video hosting and sharing." At the same time, sites such as YouTube allow for and enable so much more than just the hosting and sharing of videos. The ability to subscribe to particular users channels and to engage in commentary and discourse about videos with other users via the platform arguably makes YouTube also the largest social media site in the world and possibly a replacement for, if not an analogue to, television.

The posting of video work from the earliest days of television (work whose copyright is unknown or which has never been available on home video or syndication) as well as DIY video from cultures and communities underrepresented in mass media make YouTube and similar sites omnibus and ungated cultural archives and aggregators. For scholars of media, communications, and convergence, these sites are a contested site in which traditional divisions of professional/amateur, industry/grassroots, producer/audience, and copyright/open source become contested or destabilized (Tripp, 2012).

YouTube itself has sought to enter the television industry with a variety of initiatives, among them its partner program, subscription channels, and, most recently, YouTubeTV. YouTube's partner program allows the producers of nonprofessional videos to split advertising money for the ads placed against their content with YouTube. Granted the split is not even—YouTube receives 55 percent of the ad buy and passes along 45 percent to the producer of the video, but for video game walk-through artists like PewDiePie, vloggers like Tyler Oakley, and fashion gurus like Chriselle Lim, being a YouTube "influencer" has become a highly lucrative profession. (Oakley, 2016). YouTube subscription channels have allowed professional television franchises from other countries, such as India's Zee Channels to both reach and monetize an international audience without entering licensing, carriage or retransmission contracts as they would have to do if distributing their content via cable or satellite systems (Curtin, Holt & Sanson, 2014).

YouTubeTV has gained traction as a live-TV platform and alternative to cable or satellite packages by exploiting the possibilities of Internet protocol television, or IPTV, and making retransmission and carriage deals with broadcast and cable networks that go around the cable systems themselves. This would conflate video hosting and sharing with traditional network television, cable, and satellite industries and ultimately place all professionally produced video content in the same media ecosystem with amateur produced video. Such a change could have more dire consequences for producers of network television content than for cable or satellite companies because in the United States, the majority of homes receive their Internet service from their local cable or satellite TV companies.

Issues

Copyright issues have always inhered in the activity of video hosting and sharing from the very first days of viewers/audience members being able to make copies of video content. Most audience members are unconcerned with copyright restrictions especially in the new sharing economy (Vanderbilt, 2016; Huahg, Chen & Wang, 2012). The question of the "fair use" of copyrighted video content was at the heart of copyright infringement cases such as Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios (more commonly known as the Betamax case.) In this case, professional content producers (represented by Universal) sued the maker of home video technology (Sony) claiming that home recording of its product for the purpose of time-shifting was an infringement upon their copyright. This case was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the manufacturers of the equipment could not be held liable for infringement caused by its use, but also that the recording of an individual copy of an individual television show for individual use is "fair use" and not an infringement of the producer's copyright (Pequera, 2011).

Obviously if a copyrighted work is posted to a hosting site, its distribution far exceeds the fair use of one viewer giving another a video tape of a network show (Corasaro, 2012). The hosting of the copyrighted video, however, provides a platform for its unlimited distribution and consumption, which arguably violates the copyright of the content owner by making the content available and publicly performing it without a royalty or other payment to the copyright holder. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has become the primary authority in this situation. According to the DMCA, YouTube can enjoy a "safe harbor" and not be held accountable for copyrighted material that has been posted to its site by users. However, once YouTube has been notified by the copyright owner that specific videos posted to its site are violating their exclusive copyright, YouTube must take down the video and, if particular users are repeat offenders in the posting of copyrighted material, delete their accounts. YouTube has sought to abide by the DMCA by incorporating automated systems that crawl uploaded videos looking for watermarks and other digital signatures that content makers embed in their work, flagging suspicious videos and removing those that are clearly the property of other content holders.

This monitoring becomes complicated in the case of remix videos that draw upon copyrighted material, content that incorporates copyrighted material for the purposes of education or demonstration, content that bills itself as parody or satire, and a host of other issues that affect both copyright holders and YouTube users. YouTube users who believe their work has been erroneously removed or flagged by YouTube have several avenues of appeal as outlined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); copyright holders have sought further protections via the courts, most famously in Viacom v. YouTube (2010), in which Viacom asserted that YouTube was not doing enough to protect their copyrights, allowing the posting of copious amounts of content owned by Viacom and its subsidiaries. Initial decisions in the case were in YouTube's favor, citing the safe harbor protections of the DMCA's takedown notice structure. Viacom and other copyright holders, however, have continued to appeal court decisions, claiming that the DMCA's safe harbor accommodation merely creates a situation in which material taken down in one place can be reposted almost immediately to another account on YouTube and/or other sharing sites on the web. Litigation of this matter remains undetermined and is complicated by the same regulatory and legislative challenges that have always faced new communications and media technologies: The technological advancements and the activities they enable often outstrip the ability of Congress, courts, and regulatory agencies to legislate, adjudicate, and address the behaviors relative to existing laws and thus they are unable to anticipate future guidelines that should be enacted.

Bibliography

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