DailyMotion Secures First Licensing Deal

Back before YouTube was taken off the market for $1.65bn by Larry, Sergey & Co, a video host with a slightly more infamous existence – it was and still may be the place to go for full-length copyrighted content (television, movies, etc.) that didn’t require knowledge of BitTorrent and such – was making lots and lots of noise of its own. Its name: DailyMotion. If you haven’t heard of it ‘til this moment, you’re either an impeccable citizen or for the past several years maintained a solely subterranean life.

The reason we bring DailyMotion to light now is that despite its notorious history, it’s still managed to keep itself among the top websites of its kind (37.5 million unique visitors for May 2007, tallied worldwide). Oh, right, it’s also managed to secure a licensing deal with the production company RDF USA.

Why would a company with a significant supply of copyrighted material do business with such a vagabond careless about rules and regulations? Max Benator, the head of RDF USA’s digital division, sums it up well: “…because they have amazing traffic.”

DailyMotion, a popular item now stretching across many international bounds (it’s based in Paris), is simply doing things logically, marketing its numbers in order to maintain a competitive edge in a market quickly becoming saturated by everything from copycat hosting services to big media partnerships and content distribution deals. YouTube is doing it. Why not DailyMotion? Sure, it has made a little bit large a mess than many other members of the industry, and has even seen some losses in court; a Reuters report states that DailyMotion was ordered to provide $30,000 in damages for “carrying a copyrighted clip of a French film.”

Slowly but surely, DailyMotion is cleaning up its act. It is now using “a digital fingerprinting system called Audible Magic, which will match its database of 60 million videos with the holdings of major content owners,” and it is also in the process of blocking “leech sites” to ensure copyrighted content legally placed on DailyMotion doesn’t get copied from its servers and redistributed without the approval of its content partners elsewhere.

While I would definitely advise copyright holders and advocates to rethink their strategies where proliferation of media on the Web is concerned, there is the inevitable bargain to be made between all parties. Yes, things will be stolen no matter what, but for the most part, everyone – the providers to the end users - more or less wishes to stay in the clear. Law and order is necessary, despite the ridiculousness of how it has been enacted within the past year or so.

If you’ve managed to do a bit of research on RDF USA, you’ll know that it is not the most heavyset of content owners in the entertainment industry. It has signed deals with The North American networks of ABC, Fuse, and Logo, however it is not the owner of any current major hits. So this piece of new isn’t hugely momentous in that respect.

Nonetheless, seeing that DailyMotion has managed to attract its first significant media deal shows that the site is not likely to get trampled – at least in the near term – by its rivals. It’ll need to expand its repertoire as time passes, which is likely to occur in the seasons ahead. And if DailyMotion keeps an international perspective, I imagine it’ll gather greater interest for itself, which will no doubt keep it around for at least a few years longer.