Surprise Problems with Heritage Key YouTube Account

Update: The issue is resolved. We can access our account again, all information is still there, and embeds still working. Yet, no word of explanation from YouTube.

I walked into the office this morning and our Youtube account was shut down. Why? No idea. We have about 20 videos up on our channel which were commissioned or created directly by Heritage Key, many from Sandro Vannini. A few of the videos we posted only after getting permission from the creators. All the content was credited. We made captions for most files as well.  We have the entire transcripts posted on our site. If we made some mistake we certainly would have addressed immediately. Our many popular Heritage Key videos including King Tut's Death Mask, Animal Mummies Explained or Zahi Hawass Discovers New Tombs in the Valley of Kings are not available on Youtube right now.

When I tried to find someone to talk to at Youtube it proved to be impossible.  They do not offer any phone information (as anyone who ever tried to contact Google already knows). Google London's phone system is a dead-ending maze. When we sent in an email to ask for info we got back a standard message saying we violated some community terms--and that Youtube would not tell us which or why. Account terminated--end of story.

So today we got a shock blast of why putting your content out on the cloud is risky--and why maybe Google is getting too big.

Google/Youtube is still a major distribution channel for online video. Youtube has a "content partner" program which I guess we will need to look at now (if we can find a way to contact them). But we will also need to find partners/hosting solutions which provide more reasonable customer service. There are other video hosting solutions such as Hulu, Blip and Vimeo or of course we can put our content onto our own servers. Firefox is coming with a new system for playing video files in a browser and there are video players to use  on a site such as Flowplayer.  And of course also iTunes for podcasts which in fact we will start using soon.

Clearly Google/Youtube has to deal with copyright infringement issues. There is tons of ancient world content lifted directly from National Geographic, Discovery Channel, History Channel etc. But is it is sensible to just wipe-out accounts without looking at them closely? We have been posting content to Youtube for more than 6 months and gaining subscribers and channel views. Our videos are all branded to match our website. We even have captioned the audio and placed cc files back onto the Youtube player. Is this really the pattern that would suggest we doing something illegal or wilfully violating Community Guidelines? We do not think so.

We will try to sort this out as soon as possible. We of course have all the original shows and can reprocess them as needed, but would prefer to see our 'HeritageKeyMedia' YouTube account reinstated. We regret inconveniences to anyone that is trying to find our videos in the meantime. You can of course have your own ancient world experience by visiting our Virtual King Tut right now!

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About The Author

Jonathan Himoff

Last three pieces by this author:

King Tut Helps Egypt Net $100 Million in Revenue | Announcing the "Ancient World in London" Web Event and Content Series Starting January 2010 | UNESCO Heritage Sites Versus Museums: Survey Results for Artefacts Abroad

Jon grew up in New York and spent too much time randomly wandering the Met. Spending two summers in Greece as a teenager he had the chance to visit many piles of broken stones and soft-edge marble ruins. He would look out over the Med while imagining vast armies under sail preparing for epic battles.