The NASCAR crash followed much the same pattern so many news events do now, in the age of real-time and social media: moments after the crash occurred, there were multiple eyewitness photos and videos of the incident, including one particularly horrific one captured by university sophomore Tyler Andersen, who was sitting just to the left of the section that was hit by the debris — including a tire that flew off the race car in question. Soon, a link to the video on YouTube was racing through Twitter and other channels.

In this case, Google decided to over-rule NASCAR

Suddenly, however, the video was no longer available, and in its place was a standard YouTube message about the content being removed because of a copyright claim by NASCAR. This raised a host of questions for those who were trying to access it, including: How could the racing entity remove the video so quickly? Why didn’t YouTube protest that it should be protected by the principle of fair use, since it was a news event? And how could NASCAR claim that it had copyright over a video that was created by a fan?

When debris hits the crowd, NASCAR's precious video rights should be superseded by the right of the crowd to tell their story.

—
Cory Bergman (@corybe) February 23, 2013

The latter question was answered hours later when YouTube reinstated the video and released a statement saying that partners such as NASCAR are only allowed to remove content that breaches their copyright, and the content in question didn’t pass that test (even though NASCAR asserts in the fine print when you buy a ticket that it owns everything fans produce while at an event). Said the YouTube statement:

“Our partners and users do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they contain content which is copyright infringing, which is why we have reinstated the videos.”

The other two questions people had are even easier to answer. In a nutshell, Google provides its YouTube partners with an easy way to have content removed almost immediately: it’s a tool called Content ID, and it’s essentially a back-door to the YouTube content-management system. When a company like CNN or NBC or some other partner sees their TV shows or news clips being shared on YouTube without permission, they can submit a form and have it pulled down.

Copyright claims favor the owner, not the uploader

One of the main reasons why Google does this — and why it doesn’t bother (except in extreme cases) to protest or demand an explanation for takedown requests — is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA only gives services like YouTube “safe harbor” from copyright-infringement charges so long as the company acts quickly when it receives a takedown notice. In effect, there is virtually no leeway for protests or attempts to get a provider to defend their demands.

Prime example of DMCA abuse (which i lectured on today) mobile.theverge.com/2013/2/23/4022…

—
Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) February 24, 2013

As a number of observers — including Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — noted during the NASCAR incident, this is just one of the many ways in which the DMCA actually fosters bad behavior, or at least behavior that seems bad if you believe in free speech and freedom of the press. The fact that Google acted quickly to put the content back up is admirable, but it shouldn’t have to do this, and there are no doubt many other important cases in which it hasn’t that don’t involve something as attention-getting as a race-car crash.

And as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Technology Review pointed out in a recent essay on free speech in a digital era, our speech is to a large degree controlled by private corporations like Google and Twitter and Apple, and in many ways we are still coming to grips with what that means for us as a society.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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Now, with the latest version of Banjo available Thursday, the app is emphasizing the ability to visit distant places and experience those locations vicariously through your friends and their social connections. Instead of just focusing on what’s around, Banjo is trying to take people to new locations and give them a view on the ground of what’s happening.

“With this, we’re thinking about how we could emotionally connect you to things you actually give a damn about,” Patton said. “This kind of technology is a springboard to make thing possible that haven’t been possible before.”

Banjo was one of the many location-based people discovery apps at SXSW in Austin this year, telling you when your friends are nearby. The app, along with others like Highlight, capitalized on the person’s FOMO, or fear of missing out. Banjo has gained decent traction since its July 2011 launch (it now has more than 3 million downloads, up from 1.5 million in May), and in its initial version it notified you when friends were nearby, gave you a map of activity happening in your area, and let you view activities from other social networks.

My colleague Ryan Kim wrote in May about the company’s decision to launch on iOS, Android, and the web, instead of just iPhone, and to only broadcast location-based information that users were publicly sharing. He wrote that Banjo’s decision to pull in data from other social sites alleviated the “empty room” phenomena that many new social networks face:

He said Banjo has caught on with users because it first allows users to see other people they follow or are friends with on a variety of social platforms, not just users of Facebook but also Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vimeo and Google. Users can get alerts when their friends are nearby. Banjo allows users to view other people around them based on their public check-ins, tweets and activities. That has made the app useful right from the start, instead of plopping someone into a lonely first-time experience. And users don’t have to give away their location just to see what’s going on around them.

The update to Banjo will continue those features, emphasizing the friends-of-friends connections. So if a friend of your Facebook friend posts something in Paris, you can see how you and that person are connected, a la LinkedIn connections. And users can search by places on a new app homepage (which looks very much like the Instagram photo maps, but with social activity of your friends in those places instead of photos.)

The map feature is well-designed, and capitalizes on the FOMO impulse, for people who want to see what their friends are doing elsewhere and experience it second-hand. However, for the plenty of people who don’t frequently wish they were elsewhere, and are uncomfortable sharing location-based activity, it still seems unclear what Banjo adds to the equation, aside from aggregating and organizing all your friends’ social network activity in one place. But Patton argues that it’s not about aggregating, but rather creating a database of social activity that could be used for a variety of purposes.

“You have to look through the prism of the future,” he said.

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While Twitter already provides users with the option to expand a Tweet to view replies, re-Tweets or favorites, the new expanded Tweets will provide an actual preview of the content being Tweeted from select media partners. Media partners whose content will display in the expanded Tweets include The Wall Street Journal, Time, MSNBC, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Der Spiegel Online, BuzzFeed and TMZ, among many others.

The new expanded Tweets will begin appearing on Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile site on Wednesday, and will expand to Twitter for Android and iPhone apps soon.

While Twitter’s CEO has often said that the company is not a media company, GigaOM recently explored Twitter’s evolving role in content curation and production. Twitter’s partnership with NASCAR and hiring of an editor to curate NASCAR Tweets showed how the company is increasingly toeing the line between media production and media platform. And during the NBA finals, it encouraged fans to follow specific Twitter users, and used the basketball game to promote their specific Twitter users’ content.

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Twitter unveiled an interesting partnership with the NASCAR auto-racing circuit on Thursday, in which the real-time information network has created a kind of portal for the Pocono 400 race this weekend. The site looks like a fairly normal Twitter feed, with one important difference: in addition to highlighting tweets using an algorithm, an editor hired by Twitter will also be selecting or “curating” the stream. If that sounds like the kind of thing a media company might do, it’s probably because it is the kind of thing a media company would do — the NASCAR deal takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. Should traditional media players be concerned?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has repeatedly protested that Twitter doesn’t see itself as a media entity and doesn’t want to be one, and there are some obvious reasons why the company wouldn’t want to be seen that way, including the fact that it has been spending a lot of time negotiating partnerships with existing media players such as ESPN. It would likely be a lot harder to make the case that media companies should see the service as a partner if Twitter was promoting itself as a media company (Costolo may also be concerned that media companies don’t typically get nosebleed valuations the way tech companies do).

Curating content is what media companies do

Despite the protests, however, there is plenty of evidence that Twitter is a media entity — not a traditional one, perhaps, but a media company nevertheless. For one thing, its business model relies entirely on advertising around content, which is fundamentally the same model most media companies depend on (Facebook could be seen as a media company for the same reason). The content itself may be entirely user-generated, but then so was much of the content in the early years of the Huffington Post, now a major media player in its own right.

Until recently, Twitter was just a platform that provided easy access to this real-time content created by others. But deals like the NASCAR partnership — and offerings like the email summary powered by its Summify acquisition — are pushing Twitter further and further into the “curation” business, and that is essentially an editorial function.

Selecting tweets and photos about a car race might not seem like journalism, but what Twitter is doing is very similar to what a site like Huffington Post or even a newspaper or sports site might do with an event like NASCAR. A traditional media outlet might also have a columnist write some thoughts about the race as well or send a reporter down into the pits to interview drivers, but pulling together real-time reactions from those involved and from spectators has also become a big part of the media response to a major event.

If something like the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt were to flare up again, Twitter could quite easily adapt the NASCAR model to such an event (although there wouldn’t be the obvious commercial relationship). An editor or editors could function in much the same way that NPR editor Andy Carvin did during the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, curating tweets and even fact-checking photos and videos in real time. That is fundamentally an editorial function, whether Twitter sees it that way or not — and as Columbia University journalism professor Emily Bell notes, the network is already an important source of news.

For media companies, competition is everywhere

I have no idea whether Twitter has any intention of expanding its editorial ambitions, but the NASCAR arrangement could be an interesting precursor to a number of different scenarios: for example, the company could develop (or acquire) tools and services like Storify or Storyful that make it easier to curate and verify real-time news reports, and it could either offer those to existing media players or it could employ them itself with its own news staff. For these reasons and others, blogging pioneer Dave Winer has said he believes that news organizations should absolutely see Twitter as competition — and suspects that the company might even buy a traditional media player at some point.

The most compelling reason for Twitter to move into this kind of area is that it could increase the engagement that users have with the network, something that is fairly crucial when it comes to appealing to advertisers. Being a platform and allowing anyone to distribute content through your network is great — but coming up with reasons why users should spend time on your pages (and look at the ads) is also pretty attractive from a business point of view. Can Twitter do both at the same time? Can it offer itself as a partner for media companies while also tip-toeing into the editorial end of the business?

If nothing else, the Twitter deal with NASCAR reinforces the fact that for traditional media companies, competition is everywhere — just as Twitter itself can hire editors to curate and aggregate content, so brands and advertisers like the auto-racing entity are becoming publishers and content creators in their own right, with all the same tools that media outlets have at their disposal. Everyone is a media entity now.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Abysim and Alan Light

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VidMe Launches for Personal Video Sharing; the new video site, which goes live today, lets people share videos privately with only a chosen group of friends. (NY Times)

Hulu Said to Be in Talks With CBS, Viacom as Paid Service Nears; programming from both media companies could become part of a paid offering as early as September. (Bloomberg)

Nascar, Turner Team On 3-D; NASCAR has partnered with Turner Sports to roll out a 3-D broadcast from the Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway on July 3. (FierceOnlineVideo)

Break Media Gets in Touch With Its Feminine Side; the Los Angeles-based company has added 23 new categories, including some that are skewed toward women, such as parenting, shopping and travel. (ClickZ)

Samsung Will Use Widevine’s Technologies Worldwide; Samsung already uses Widevine to deliver connected TV experiences with products in the United States. That cooperation will soon expand globally, both companies announced today. (Streaming Media)

Kantar Debuts Tool To Analyze DirecTV Set-Top Data; Kantar’s new software lets customers analyze live and DVR audience viewing behaviors at a second-by-second level across more than 350 channels. (Multichannel News)

Channel 4 Back To £3 Million Online Profit; online video investment is now paying off for Channel 4, as its Future Media division turned in a £3.2 million ($4.8 million) operating profit during 2009. (paidContent:UK)

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Speed2 isn’t the only online offering that’s tied to a customer’s cable subscription or choice of broadband provider. ESPN’s recently-renamed ESPN3 network is limited to a few select ISPs, and Cablevision launched a site called MSG Varsity last year that restricts some of its content to Cablevision customers.

It’s unclear yet whether consumers will bite and subscribe to a cable channel or become customers of a certain network operator simply because of such a broadband network site. The first comments on Speed’s website seem to reveal that some of its viewers have different ideas of how Speed2 should work. Here’s just one example:

“I will gladly pay for Speed online as soon as I get the PC > TV hookup. Then I can DUMP $175 in Time Warner crap every month!  :)”

However, it seems like Speed didn’t completely ignore the wishes of many motor sports fans: Speed’s programming has long been dominated by NASCAR, leading to complaints by fans of other tournaments. Speed2 on the other hand will not feature any NASCAR coverage at all.

Picture courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user tonylanciabeta.

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NASCAR.com

So what do NASCAR visitors watch? I know, the answer seems kinda obvious, but it might be worth pointing out that the site isn’t actually transmitting video of any of the races in real time, thanks to its affiliation with Turner Broadcasting stations TNT and SPEED, which carry the races exclusively. Instead, it offers a bunch of catch-up clips as well as videos of press conferences and similar events.

The next best thing to a live video feed the site has to offer is the option to follow the races in an animated setting that looks a lot like a video game, complete with multiple camera angles for each driver as well as the drivers’ audio feed, for $12.95 per month or $79.95 per year through its RaceView subscription. NASCAR.com utilizes Flash and Octoshape’s P2P plug-in to deliver RaceView videos. Turner wasn’t able to provide us with the number of paying RaceView subscribers.

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Turner Partners with News Corp. for NASCAR Web Video Channel; “NASCAR on Speed” will feature Speed Channel talent and have three original series. (MediaWeek)

U.S. Open Serves 6.4 Million Streams During First Week; 1.4 million video consoles were open for an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes. (paidContent)

JibJab Hops on Board Soul Train; stick your face on a dancer’s body from the classic music show. (TechCrunch)

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