Freeview Australia spoof ad disappears from YouTube

"Freeview" (Wikipedia) is a campaign by Australian free-to-air channels to convince you that free-to-air TV is not mostly boring rubbish. The campaign boasts about the fact that Australians will have fifteen digital channels to choose from on free-to-air TV, instead of the six free-to-air channels that Australians have (at least the ones who live in a major city).

What the campaign doesn't mention is that most of the new channels are just exact rebroadcasts of the already-existing free-to-air channels (exceptions include ABC2 and SBS World News, which broadcasts foreign-language news reports). So some Melbourne comedians doing a show about TV today decided to parody the Freeview TV commercial.

The parody was posted on the Internet's most popular video-sharing site, YouTube, but today it disappeared, due to a "terms of use violation".

However the video is available on several other video-sharing sites, including this copy from break.com:

Freeview: More of the same sh#t - Watch more



The Tech Wired AU blog has an interview with one of the creators of the spoof video commercial, and a link where you can download it yourself. Meanwhile, Margaret Simons' blog at Crikey, The Content Makers, reports a denial by Freeview that they have plans to sue the makers of the spoof, and also a denial that they had anything to do with its removal from YouTube.