This morning I was reading an excellent piece on Ars Technica asking the question Did "Lazy Sunday" make YouTube's $1.5 billion sale possible?. I looked back at our data and blog posts over the past few years to see whether we can help answer the question. To remind readers, "Lazy Sunday" refers to a Saturday Night Live "rap about a pair of lame white guys from the Village who wanted nothing more than to spend a Sunday afternoon in the theater, watching The Chronicles of Narnia". NBC Universal's general counsel, Rick Cotton, said (at DMW's Future of Television Forum East last week) that he believes that the SNL skit vaulted YouTube to popularity. We blogged about this skit the week after it aired in December 2005, showing that in one week, the skit propelled YouTube ahead of Google Video with much of that traffic coming from MySpace. Visits continued to climb from there.

Is scarcity still a viable foundation for a business model for content owners? For most of their histories, movie and TV studios relied on a strategy of limited distribution to extract maximum value from their works. Movies were released through a carefully ordered sequence of exclusive windows defined by distribution channel (theaters, DVD, pay-TV, broadcast); network TV series didn't enter the broader syndication market for three or four years after their debut, assuming the series lasted that long. In each case, the relative scarcity of the content provided the content owner with maximum pricing power. Since the advent of digital platforms, however, ubiquity has become the name of the game, challenging content owners' pricing power and business models.

Los Angeles - NBC Universal general counsel Rick Cotton has called for the creation of a Cabinet-level position to address piracy of intellectual property, Variety reported.