This has been bugging me for awhile, and I've just got to get it out in the open: If I want to put a cool movie trailer, a funny Comedy Central clip, or a news clip on my web site, why do I have to go to YouTube, where some kid has uploaded it in violation of the owner's copyright, and where as likely as not it'll be yanked a few days later, in order to do it? I'm talking about stuff that's already on the web--Comedy Central puts the best clips from its shows on its own web site, as does NBC for Saturday Night Live, and Apple.com has all the best movie trailers. But while I can stick a pirated clip from YouTube on my web site with two clicks, there's usually no simple, straightforward way to do the same thing from a legitimate site.

Some companies have shown signs of getting a clue. Google Video now hosts many movie trailers and some of them can be embeddeded in blogs and MySpace pages, some movies and TV shows--in particular those targeted at the youth market--now have a presence on YouTube, and a few big record labels have struck music video deals with YouTube, but the selection remains pretty bare. What troubles me is that there's no discernible disadvantage for companies to put their own TV clips, movie trailers, and music videos online in a YouTube-like way. There can't be a technical barrier--the tiny dev team at Netscape.com put together their impressive embeddable video-sharing feature in a matter of weeks--nor a commercial one--movie trailers are advertisements, as are TV clips in their own way, and there's no downside to allowing them to reach more eyeballs. What's more, if they hosted their own embeddable videos, they could decide what plays before and after them instead of some kid on YouTube deciding for them, and though they'd be crazy to put anything longer than a two seconds before the video, after the video is a great time to advertise, as the Revver folks have discovered.

So, movie studios, TV networks, ad agencies, and record companies, here's my plea: Let me advertise your stuff on my web site. Hire some smart folks to put together a Flash player like YouTube's for your site, give me HTML snippets to copy and paste into my blog, and let my visitors see your stuff, and your ads, without the extra clicks and without waiting for your lame Windows Media Player to load. Don't make me go to YouTube for what you, in the interest of your shareholders, should be giving me yourselves.