NBC: YouTube is our ‘fr-enemy’

Late-night wrapup from the Cisco tech analyst conference, which might be the last place you’d expect to hear execs from NBC and Disney talking about online video. But there Tuesday afternoon was George Kliavkoff, NBC Universal’s chief digital officer, drawing laughs from the geek crowd by calling YouTube and other video-sharing sites “our fr-enemies,” because of the love-hate relationships between the duos.

Kliavkoff explained that NBC has several kinds of content, and one type — promotional trailers, ads and commercials — is the sort that “we want everywhere, so we embrace YouTube and their brethren.” On the other end of the spectrum are the “crown jewels” of finished, full-length material — “we carefully think out how to put that [material] on the ‘Net,” Kliavkoff said. We’ll share some more digital thoughts from Kliavkoff in a following post.