Perez Hilton’s YouTube accounts suspended
December 25th, 2007 | by aobaoill |In many senses this may appear trivial, particularly if you’re not a particular fan of (that particular brand of) celebrity gossip. However, as noted in several places this is a straightforward, clear, example of the power of media oligopolies, and the problems that can occur when one corporation becomes the dominant portal/host for a certain class of content, be it video (YouTube), books (Amazon) or general search (Google).
The folks at Miro – the “free open-source desktop video application that is designed to make mass media more open and accessible for everyone” – posit open standards as a means to circumvent the network effects problem with YouTube:
Open platforms, such as blip.tv (for creators) and Miro (for viewers), are a critical piece of the solution. Because both of these examples are built on open standards, they inter-operate with everything else in the open ecosystem. YouTube seems intimidatingly large, until you compare it to all of the open alternatives on the web.
There’s still the possibility of the “Miro Guide” excluding a particular provider, but because of how the software works (drawing on RSS feeds from individual providers) providers wouldn’t actually be blocked from access to customers.