Speculation is rife as to whether YouTube may have to renegotiate its deals with major content owners because of delays in implementing more sophisticated technology to monitor what content is being uploaded to its servers.
As previously reported, the video sharing site has been busy doing deals with music and media companies whose content has been unofficially uploaded to YouTube in a bid to avoid any major litigation from those content owners. Those deals, with most of the major labels and media companies like CBS, offer the content owner a cut of ad revenues based on the amount of their content uploaded and viewed.
Which is all well and good in theory, but when you have a system as full of content as YouTube monitoring what content is being made available, and who owns the copyright on it, is no easy task. The content owners aren't willing to undertake the monitoring, so that job falls to YouTube. Insiders say the current monitoring system is pretty low-tech, but YouTube has plans to implement a much more sophisticated operation, the promise of which probably figured in most of YouTube's content deals. But, according to the FT and new media mag Red Herring, that new sophisticated system is behind schedule, which Red Herring in particular reckons could affect YouTube's existing content deals, while also weakening their hand in negotiations with other content owners.
How long YouTube's most sophisticated content tracking system will take to implement, and whether it will ever be as sophisticated as the company says, remains to be seen. Some industry commentators point out that few of the content tracking systems that have already been developed, like those being tested by fledgling legit P2P platforms, have actually been as good as their makers have promised (something which is seemingly preventing many of those companies developing legit P2P platforms from actually launching).
Nevertheless, for the time being at least, most of those content companies already in bed with YouTube seem willing to give the video site more time to enhance its monitoring technology, such are the marketing and revenue opportunities of the site which, unlike MySpace, doesn't seem to be floundering technically so much despite high demand for its streams.