Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Google and YouTube: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down
byBy now everyone has probably heard the news on the Google, YouTube deal. Two weeks ago, Mark Cuban said anybody who would buy YouTube for $1.6 million is a moron. Yesterday on his blog, he said they are crazy for going ahead with this, and they are heading for the ultimate litigious nightmare.
But on the other hand…
The MIT Advertising Lab blog, has a very different take:
“[A]ll Google needs to do is to take the wealth of online video content and put it in the 10-foot environment—the living room—while making sure the viewer feels no difference between watching Google TV and regular programming, and then suddenly the range of available channels jumps from 200 to tens of thousands, and Google controls almost all of it.”
I discussed this on the Sundog blog in August (What Happens When You Have 5000 Channels To Watch?).
It seems the deal is fraught with opportunity and peril. Google is certainly not shy about testing the limits of copyright law, so the potential for litigation with the YouTube business model seems to meet their opportunity/risk criteria. If the opportunity does play out, Google could become one of the biggest players in media wherever the consumer is watching it. If it doesn’t work out, they just spent a little over one percent of their $132 billion market cap for the experiment.
