Sky News ditches YouTube
Sky News Australia has dropped its two year experiment with uploading key content to YouTube in favour of carrying video on its own site, which is shortly to be unveiled.
The pay TV news provider has five channels on YouTube – SkyNewsAustralia, SkyNewsBusiness, SkyNewsShowbiz, SkyNewsSport and SkyNewsNewZealand.
The main SkyNewsAustralia channel has had nearly 400,000 video views since the five channels were launched on YouTube in June 2007. The most watched video is political editor David Speers’ interview with News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch which has been viewed around 100,000 times.
But Sky News ceased uploading videos to the channel on December 20.
Meanwhile, the SkyBusinessChannel, which has had 33,000 video views, has not been updated since last September.
SkyNewsShowbiz – with more than 800,000 views – and SkyNewsSport with 146,000 views – haven’t been updated since August.
The SkyNewsNewZealand channel was abandoned just three weeks into the project, with the first video being uploaded on June 26 2007 and the last on August 13
Sky News is a joint venture between PBL Media, Seven Media Group and British Sky Broadcasting. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp is the biggest shareholder in BSB.
YouTube is owned by Google.
Murdoch has been vociferous in his criticisms of Google making what he sees as free use of others’ content.
A spokesman for Sky News told Mumbrella: “”Sky News is preparing to unveil new websites in coming weeks and the video footage will be accessible there.”
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I wonder whether Rupert feels comfortable sitting there listening to David Speers rambling on about how he is the “world’s most powerful media owner”….
Did Rupert make funny faces at David during the introduction to cause the stumble at 0:42? LOL!
Good interview though…!!
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any news on the new provider…are they taking it in-house, using a 3rd party (such as brightcove), etc
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Can i point out that SkyNewsAustralia uploaded a video only 4 hours ago from posting this comment…
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Wrong!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y96NE4pf6SI
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Could have fooled me, there’s an interview with Rudd up there at the moment.
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Doesn’t look dead to me, new stuff was uploaded today.
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I really only used it for the (now non updating) mediaweek vids, because as much as I love James Manning, I’m not going to pay actual money for him!
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I suggest the business case for the move was “If we host it ourselves we can hide the real number of views”.
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Hi Simon, Rich, Mitchell & anonymous.
You’re right – oddly, an hour or two after this story appeared, they posted one more video, the first one of the year. As far as I can see they’ve posted nothing else since on their main SkyNewsAustralia channel or any of the others.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella