Young Turn to Web Sites Without Rules

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 1 — Popular Web sites like YouTube and MySpace have hired the equivalent of school hallway monitors to police what visitors to their sites can see and do by cracking down on piracy and depictions of nudity and violence.

So where do the young thrill-seekers go?

Increasingly, to new Web sites like Stickam.com, which is building a business by going where others fear to tread: into the realm of unfiltered live broadcasts from Web cameras.

The site combines elements of more popular sites, but with a twist. In addition to designing their own pages and uploading video clips, its users broadcast live video of themselves and conduct face-to-face video chats with other users, often from their bedrooms and all without monitoring by any of Stickam’s 35 employees.

Other social networks have decided against allowing conversations over live video because of the potential for abuse and opposition from child-safety advocates. “The only thing you get from the combination of Web cams and young people are problems,” said Parry Aftab, executive director of the child protection organization WiredSafety.org. “Web cams are a magnet for sexual predators.”

The larger Internet companies have come under increasing pressure to make their sites safer for children and friendlier to copyright holders, so start-ups like Stickam are pursuing their own slices of the market, often at the price of taste, ethics and perhaps even child safety.

“Letting people do whatever they want is one way for these sites to differentiate themselves,” said Josh Bernoff, a Forrester Research analyst. “It is the race to the bottom.”

Video-sharing sites in particular are filling niches abandoned by YouTube, which is now owned by Google and had more than 25 million visitors last month. Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has banned nudity and taken down copyrighted material when rights holders file specific complaints.

Last March, under additional pressure from copyright holders, YouTube placed a 10-minute limit on clips.

Smaller start-ups who are not able, or willing, to be as diligent are seeing their audiences explode as users seek the more freewheeling environment that typified YouTube’s early days. Users post 9,000 new videos a day to Dailymotion, which had more than 1.3 million visitors in November, up more than 100 percent since May, according to the tracking firm ComScore Media Metrix.

A recent search on Dailymotion, which is based in Paris, found hours of copyrighted material: entire episodes of NBC’s “Heroes” and CBS’s “Without a Trace,” recordings of Beatles concerts and plenty of nudity. The firm places no length restrictions on uploaded video.

Benjamin Bejbaum, the chief executive of Dailymotion, said the firm’s 30 employees move quickly to take down video when users or rights-holders flag it as inappropriate or illegal. Mr. Bejbaum’s company is seeking the kinds of revenue-sharing deals with copyright holders that Google has struck, he said.

Dailymotion currently shows ads to its users in France, which make up 40 percent of visitors to the service, and is studying an entry into the United States.

Another new video-sharing site, LiveLeak, based in London, has positioned itself as a source for reality-based fare like footage of Iraq battle scenes and grisly accidents. Last week, popular clips on the site included one of an agitated man in Muslim dress on a fast-moving treadmill and video of an American A-20 aircraft bombing Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

Hayden Hewitt, a co-owner of LiveLeak, said that people who have been barred from YouTube for uploading explicit footage of the Iraq war have migrated to his site. LiveLeak “won’t ban anyone for showing the truth,” Mr. Hewitt said. The site also features ample sexual content that would never make it onto YouTube or MySpace.

To support itself, LiveLeak runs ads from the syndicated ad network Adbrite. Mr. Hewitt said the company was not trying to get rich or dethrone YouTube, but to create a place on the Web for unvarnished reality.

Few of these new video sites, though, worry child-safety advocates as much as Stickam, which mostly attracts young people comfortable with the idea of a continuous self-produced reality TV show starring themselves. Stickam, based in Los Angeles, says it has 260,000 registered users — 50,000 of them say their age is 14 to 17 — and is adding 2,000 to 3,000 each day.

Advanced Video Communications, a Los Angeles company that builds video conferencing systems for companies, founded Stickam (pronounced stick-cam) late last year to demonstrate its technology. Its first product was a program that let users bring a live Web cam feed directly onto their MySpace pages and other social networks and bulletin boards.

In October, MySpace blocked the Stickam service. MySpace’s chief security officer, Hemanshu Nigam, said the firm “has not implemented video chat features, given the safety implications for our users.”

By then, Stickam was testing its own social networking service to compete directly with MySpace. The new site prohibits anyone under 14 from joining, and its terms of service forbid “obscene, profane and indecent” behavior. But since the company does not verify a user’s age, and because users’ broadcasts are live, even the firm’s chief executive, Hideki Kishioka, concedes those rules are unenforceable. The company is “relying on users to monitor each other,” he said.

Even enthusiastic Stickam users say the site often feels lawless. “People are very vulgar and like to ‘get their jollies’ from harassing people, mainly girls, to take off their clothes,” said Chelsey, a 17-year-old user from Saskatchewan in Canada, who signed up after her 13-year-old sister violated the site’s age rules and joined the service.

“I’m pretty sure none of their parents know or even think about the things that they are doing on this site,” said Chelsey, who said in an e-mail message that she did not feel comfortable using her last name in an interview.

Other companies that offer Web cam chats say that the technology seems to attract abuse. “There are just some people who, if you give them a Web cam, are going to take off their clothes,” said Jason Katz, founder of PalTalk, an eight-year-old service that lets users converse over Web cams on various topics. Unlike Stickam, PalTalk asks for a credit card and charges a monthly fee, which it says prevents minors from signing up.

At least one major media company has embraced Stickam. Last month, Warner Brothers Records opened a page on the service for two of its artists, Jamie Kennedy and Stu Stone, and trained a Web cam on them as they recorded a music video. More than 9,500 users watched the event and chatted with the performers during breaks in filming.

Robin Bechtel, Warner’s vice president for new media, said she thinks Stickam “could be the next MySpace” and that people would migrate to even controversial video sites if they have features that MySpace and YouTube did not. “People are going to go where the content is,” Ms. Bechtel said. “If Stickam has celebrities and is entertaining, they will go there.”

Mr. Kihioka of Stickam said that in some respects, his site was actually safer than other social networks. Live video feeds let users “know who they are talking to,” he said. “Unlike MySpace, it is hard to disguise yourself.” But he added that his company had the same concerns about child safety as MySpace and was working on an automated system that would monitor live video feeds for indecency.

Child-safety experts are not convinced. They say that sites like Stickam are the motivation for them to work closely with sites like MySpace and YouTube to create safeguards.

“If we discourage the use of the more corporately responsible social networking sites, kids will go underground to more edgier ones,” said Donna Rice Hughes, president of the Internet safety organization Enough Is Enough in Virginia. “Then we’ll have more of a problem.”

Top Story of 2006: Iraq

"Grave—and deteriorating" was the Iraq Study Group's grim diagnosis of the situation in Iraq. But anyone who watched the networks' coverage in 2006 knew this long before the bipartisan group issued its report last month.

Top 10 news stories of 2006
(Mins) Total ABC CBS NBC
Iraq combat: U.S.-led fighting continues 1,122 343 394 385
Israel-Lebanon fighting 578 177 196 204
Hurricane Katrina aftermath 369 102 75 190
September 11 attacks aftermath 229 76 67 87
Oil, gasoline prices increase 207 60 65 82
Illegal immigration legislation debate 202 47 77 78
Iraq sectarian violence escalates 187 51 54 80
Iraq war correspondents at risk 170 58 73 39
Campaign 2006: House elections 165 50 58 57
North Korea nuclear weapons program 162 54 54 55

Note: totals through December 26
Based on three-network weekday nightly newscasts



Iraq was the story of the year for 2006, occupying fully 14% of the entire newshole, according to the year-end totals for the weekday nightly newscasts of the Big Three broadcast networks. The war reclaimed the top spot after being displaced in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, and it halted a steady decline in coverage since the war began in 2003.
Of the year's top five stories, four were continuations of long-running stories: the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Katrina, the aftermath of 9/11 and the climbing price of oil. The fifth concerned a fresh calamity: the four-week summer war between Israel and Hezbollah along the Lebanon border. Besides oil prices, the only other domestic stories to crack the top 10 were the midterm elections and the debate over illegal-immigration legislation.

The Bush administration—and supporters of its conduct of the war—has long complained that nightly news coverage of Iraq is dominated by the daily death tolls. This characterization had no basis in fact when the war started in 2003. But in 2006, for the first time, it was accurate.

Only 38% of the networks' Iraq newshole at the war's start was devoted to combat itself (alongside reporting on reconstruction efforts, political reforms and the fate of Saddam Hussein, among other stories). In 2004 and 2005, the focus on combat rose to 44%, and finally attained majority status at 56% in the past year.

The Iraq story selection on NBC Nightly News focused most heavily on the U.S. military combat angle (59% compared to 56% on CBS and 53% on ABC). Befitting the network that ostentatiously chose to call the violence a "civil war," NBC also concentrated more than its rivals on the sectarian violence (80 minutes compared to 54 on CBS and 51 on ABC).

Whether the focus on the spiraling violence unjustly crowded out "a lot of the good things that are happening that aren't covered," as First Lady Laura Bush suggested in an interview on MSNBC, is not clear. But let us not forget that 2006 was a grave year for journalists attempting to cover the situation on the ground in Iraq.

ABC's Bob Woodruff suffered severe head injury when the convoy he and cameraman Doug Vogt were traveling in was hit by an improvised explosive device. An attack in May killed cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, and left CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier with crippling leg injuries. It's no wonder that their networks devoted more time to reporting on the dangers faced by correspondents (58 minutes on ABC and 73 on CBS versus 39 on NBC).

No doubt, all three networks' Iraq coverage is shaped by the experiences of their correspondents and crew members. The lack of security not only colors their reporting of the worsening violence—it often prevents them from covering the sort of non-combat stories that the first lady believes they are ignoring.

Music Industry Changes

Music Industry Changes
Its Tune on Podcasting
By ETHAN SMITH
January 2, 2007; Page B4
After two years of hesitancy, the music industry is finally taking its first steps toward embracing podcasting.

When podcasts attained prominence in 2004, amateurs and advertisers alike heralded the downloadable audio programs as the next step in the evolution of broadcasting. But they have failed to make headway in one key area: music programming.

For a variety of reasons -- including fear of piracy and the need to be paid -- the major record labels and music publishers that control the rights to about 75% of the commercially released music in the U.S. have refused to make deals that would allow songs to be used in podcasts. Consequently, podcasts have been blocked from using this music, at least legitimately. That has stopped music-oriented radio programming from being available as podcasts.


Johnny Cash
That is starting to change. San Francisco-based Rock River Communications Inc. has struck some of the first deals to license major-label content for podcasts. Rock River, which specializes in making the mix CDs sold at the check-out counters of retailers like Gap Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc.'s Pottery Barn, is creating a series of promotional podcasts on behalf of corporate clients including DaimlerChrysler AG and Ford Motor Co.

Chrysler and Ford pay Sony BMG Music Entertainment -- the joint venture of Sony Corp. and Germany's Bertelsmann AG -- a flat fee, which the companies decline to disclose, for the right to distribute the podcasts for a year, regardless of how many or how few copies are downloaded. Users can keep the programs on their personal computers or MP3 players indefinitely.

"What we're doing with podcasts is taking the King Biscuit Flower Hour notion of sponsored content," says Rock River President and Chief Executive Jeff Daniel. He is referring to a popular radio program in the 1970s and '80s that was sponsored by a regional baking-products company called King Biscuit Flour. "It's a patronage model."

Thanks to a tangle of legal and financial problems, record labels have been slow to license their music for podcasts. For starters, podcasts are almost all delivered in the MP3 format, which includes none of the special software that other digital-music formats use to prevent wholesale copying. That has contributed to podcasts' popularity by making it simple to disseminate them and load them onto any digital music player, not just iPods. But it has also made music companies uneasy, since they have in nearly all cases insisted that online music sellers wrap their files in copy-protection software.

The other major hurdle facing podcasts has been the difficulty of figuring out how labels and artists should be paid. Many podcasts are free, like broadcast or Internet radio; but because of key differences between those media and podcasting, the performance rights royalties that are collected from broadcasters don't apply to podcasts. Plus, given that many podcasters are do-it-yourselfers who give their content away, it isn't even clear where those royalties might come from.

For now, Rock River has struck licensing deals only with Sony BMG, to include four to eight songs in podcasts created on behalf of its clients. The "Chrysler Music Legends" series focuses on a specific artist in each program, and includes 30-second ads from the car maker at a few points in the program. Subjects of the biographical programs have included Miles Davis, Johnny Cash and Journey.

The programs are available from Chrysler's home page and from the podcasting section of Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. The Ford series isn't due to launch until later this month, but Rock River executives say they are in discussions to license content from multiple major labels.

Licensing music for podcasting has long been a source of internal debate at music labels. Many executives argue that it is worth handing over some content to spur consumer interest, while others maintain that the companies erode the value of their product by knowingly allowing it to be freely downloaded and copied.

Ted Cohen, a digital-media strategist who for many years was an executive at EMI Group PLC, says that keeping up-and-coming artists "protected" from use in podcasts has often backfired. "We've protected them so well nobody knows they exist," he quips.

Adam Block, senior vice president and general manager of Sony BMG's Legacy Recordings, says the podcasts are "essentially a movie trailer for our projects." He says the possibility of the shows' being copied wasn't much of a concern because the songs are embedded within a long program that would be difficult to redistribute.

Write to Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com