I hope there are enough exhibitionist teens and accident-prone cats to maintain the appeal of Youtube. Because clips from the Daily Show and other Viacom properties, one of the major draws for the online video library, could soon be gone from the Google unit. Till now, content owners have tended to file for the removal of clips on a case by case basis. Now New York's Viacom, which controls MTV Networks, has demanded that Google remove all the media giant's copyrighted content. It's probably just an aggressive negotiating move, but this is the first open challenge by the traditional TV industry to Google's video ambitions. In an earlier and more innocent era, Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show, quite enjoyed additional exposure on the web.

I'm surprised people don't have cables coming out of their asses, because that's going to be a new thing. You're just going to get it directly fed into you. I look at systems like the Internet as a convenience. I look at it as the same as cable or anything else. Everything is geared toward more individualized consumption. Getting it off the Internet is no different than getting it off TV. We're not going to shut it down - we don't even know what it is. I'm having enough trouble just getting porn. [Jon Stewart, in Wired, 2005]

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