Japanese video clips

The biggest internet success story of 2006 has to be YouTube, the video clip site that was bought by Google for $1.65bn (£883m) this month. Showing over 100 million clips a day, the site has become popular with Japanophiles as a good source of Japanese anime, TV commercials, variety show clips, music videos and movie trailers.

Following the Google buy-out however, YouTube has become a victim of its own success and although the takeover has resulted in improved searchability of the site, its new owners have become more cautious about users uploading copyright material. While the site used to turn a blind eye to copyright violations, they’ve now started removing clips following complaints from the copyright-holders.

First Japanese broadcaster NHK complained about the illegal use of its material, and then on the 20th October the BBC reported that a further 30,000 clips have been removed after the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers contacted YouTube.

As YouTube’s upload guidelines become stricter, it remains to be seen whether this will affect the site’s popularity in the long run. Already there are numerous other video sites out there which are less popular and therefore less concerned with copyright issues, so it may be the case that people looking for Japan-related material will turn to these sites in future.

Three sites where an assortment of Japanese video clips can be found are FileCabi.net, Flurl and (featuring mostly adult content) Heaven666. Unlike YouTube or its sister-site Google Video, these sites are still relatively unconcerned about copyright, but also seem unconcerned about ensuring content is suitable for all the family; be warned, there’s some sex and violence (though probably not in the same clip) on these sites, and some people may be offended by the amount of adult dating advertising or the occasional racist comments posted by users.

Still, there are a few interesting clips on these sites, and as YouTube’s rules continue to become more restrictive hopefully there’ll be a lot more uploaded in future.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Articles in English, Other Websites and blogs, Website Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.