The BBC has tapped YouTube for potentially significant traffic gains, however some media owners are wary of the damage to their brand and business from illegal uploading of programming.

MTV-owner Viacom recently demanded the removal of 100,000 illegally posted clips of its shows, and then subsequently announced that traffic had increased, supposedly as a result, to Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon during February.

CBS on the other hand has stated that promotional clips on YouTube have increased viewing of the likes of David Letterman's Late Show, as has the Sundance Channel.

"We have obviously spent some months working with Google/Youtube's lawyers to make sure there aren't these issues," said Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC. "We think that the reach is worth it for us, it is significant. And remember we are not giving away any long-form programming."

Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising and marketing group WPP, has coined Google as a "frenemy" - meaning it can be seen both as a partner and a competitive threat.

In the BBC's case, the issue is leveraging its positive facets - such as potentially tens of millions of users seeing content and some income from ad revenue - and policing illegal content outside of its brand pages.

David Moody, director of strategy for BBC Worldwide, says that the BBC has previously acted to have content removed from YouTube and would do so again "if necessary".

Fox has worked both sides of the relationship. In January it successfully subpoenaed YouTube to get the identity of a user who had posted episodes of shows such as the season premiere of 24 before it had aired on its own network - clearly a damaging situation for the company.

This spat did not hamper the relationship it has through a promotional channel for its news called Fox News Blast.

"On the public service side much of the content acts as promotional material. (We would step in) only when it directly infringes our rights - such as clips of all the goals of Match of the Day or a politically-biased re-edit of our news," added Mr Highfield.

Last July, Premium TV, the digital rights and broadband company with clients including UKTV, Cartoon Network, World Rally Championship, and the Football League, launched a service on sister website Google Video.

"We didn't put up content we thought would cannabalise our own subscriptions or ad revenue," said Oliver Slipper, chief executive of PTV. "We have not seen a downside in terms of lost subscriptions, and in fact have received more traffic. Once Google's new video ad platform launches it will be interesting to see if it will provide incremental ad revenues."

Google is starting a two-month trial delivering video ads on Google Video from Monday.

The BBC's Mr Moody said that for the BBC, litigation was certainly not the first course of action.

"It is not best to lead with lawyers, it is best to lead with content and engage."

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