I have no where really to express my hatred for bad businesses except here I suppose so why not.
The business of squatting over alleged intellectual property is so gigantic it has spawned massive businesses monetizing the policing of said property all over the world, not only in a weird international tax shelter type of way, but also out in the open in Vancouver, Canada.
Located in Vancouver, Broadband TV is a Persian set top box company that morphed inexplicably into a youtube 'multichannel network', who engaged in a number of dubious business practices relating to youtube copyright claims. Their CEO was some persian lady who met justin trudeau, and did talks about being a girl boss even though all she ever did was crush nerds who made videos for a pittance under her designer heels.
I looked into them quite closely years ago, as I remember they had essentially three operations. The first and least important was slop content they generated themselves that got nearly 0 engagement and quickly dried up.
From 1 week ago, onto a new grift I guess.
The second was their VISO platform and the multichannel network. This was the same scam that every MCN runs, which is that they find dedicated small creators and convince them that the only way they can grow is if they join their network, that they will help in someway to grow their channel faster. As you can imagine there are only a couple levers one can pull to make that happen. Can you advertise my videos? No, because your slop you generate is not appealing and so you have no reach. Instead they offered creators standard MCN services which importantly include DMCA submissions (to protect your precious copyright), as well as the VISO platform, which itself was not unique. Its main feature was a supposedly algorithmic review of your youtube thumbnail, that surely would rocket you to success, if only you got the precise combination of high saturation, clickbait phrase and open mouthed retard. If you look this up now on youtube you find maybe hundreds of critical reviews explaining why this technology and all other services provided were not helpful, and sometimes harmful.
I was curious how they could possibly make money doing this and found the answer only after reading through the glassdoor reviews of their office. Essentially what former employees described was a position that was pitched as though it were a tech job, but instead consisted of spending the entire day searching through low subscriber youtube accounts, attempting to find people who were dedicated to making videos, then pitching the MCN to them, essentially a sales position. The idea was, it costs nothing to sign up a channel to your network, but if they make it big or even make any money at all, you get to scoop off your percentage. Also due to the way google allows MCNs, all the money runs through BBTV, and they subsequently pay the creator. This means BBTV has large amounts of money they can play with, while occasionally being tardy with payments, or paying through lines of credit or whatever. This money shuffling got them in trouble at one point when they stiffed ETHAN KLEIN of his payout, because somehow he was affiliated with an MCN rather than just doing his own finances like an adult. Having many channels signed up also allowed them to brag about how many viewers they had in some period, and it gave them a huge content library to copyright troll people with, which is often resolved through google ads by google just redirecting ad revenue to the copyright holders account.
Busy lady, good thing she doesn't have to run a productive business that adds value to the world.
The last grift was the corporate media grift. They sucked at the toes of major boomer corporations, unfamiliar with new media, promising they would arrange all their posting and copyright matters. This is where I think they made most of their money. As an example, they were contracted by the NBA to oversee how its content was distributed onto youtube, and created NBA playmakers for that purpose. The issue the boomers at the NBA saw was that lil phillipinos and other dusky individuals who love basketball were making documentaries and highlights with THEIR CONTENT, and the NBA wasn't even getting a taste! Something must be done! So by contracting this copyright troll, who packaged closely pursuing NBA fans for their ad revenue as integration with the NBA, BBTV was able to become the dogsbody for a major corporation. NBA playmakers was heavily criticized by these small creators, who were doing just fine without it. Notably, the NBA demanded they use super highquality footage for every clip, when most of these guys were making little memes, or docs with very short clips, all of which should easily have fallen under fair use.
Here is a now unlisted video I happened to have book marked years ago where the creator explains that basically the NBA wanted to restrict them from taking their own clips, offered them only limited highlight reels, and even then made the files way to big so they were unwieldly to work with :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXdxcFUk-zk
BBTV was very focused on content discovery for the purpose of issuing take down notices, this was the primary thing they pitched corporate clients like the NBA. The promise was that we can find your content, strike it, and gain the ad revenue for you. Or just take it down if it displeases you. Amusingly I have the suspicion they didnt actually develop any technology of their own, and instead were just repackaging tools already offered by Google, but I am perhaps not tech savvy enough to get to the root of that. Here is an archived page from their site describing this technology :
https://web.archive.org/web/20110816100533/http://broadbandtvcorp.com/content-detection/
There is probably more but I'm not sure how interesting this is, I was briefly obsessed with this company and am pleased to note their office is now a shitty diploma mill. In true Canadian fashion
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