If you haven’t heard the news, Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion dollars. Sounds like they have watched Austin Powers one too many times, but that is a different discussion. The law suit is going be one of many by providers that Google will have to face in regards to content issues with YouTube. So with all of these ticking bombs ready to go off one would ask why did they buy YouTube?
I heard an interesting idea as to why, and it does make sense to me…
“The reason that Google bought YouTube is because the original company would not have had the resources or funds to successfully fight these types of lawsuits. Google having a large War Chest for Legal issues would really have no problem with dealing with these law suits.  Now interestingly enough, if Google did not buy YouTube and YouTube lost any law suits brought against them, then a precedence is set for them to do the same with Google Video and all the others.”
So what are your thoughts?
Matt
March 24, 2007 11:25 am
I think that Google bought YouTube because their own video service, Google Video, was getting beaten by YouTube, very easily to. So, everybody knows, when Google’s products don’t go over well, they buy the competition (just look at Writely). YouTube was an excellent buy for them anyways, thousands of already dedicated users, thousands of videos and the possibility to make a little more money. So, basically, they could buy them, move them over to their servers, and little more marketing or anything was really necessary. The original team is still working there, maybe a new Google employee or two also, and they can just slowly fade out Google Video and start advertising their best previous competition as now their own. It was a great deal for them, and really, what’s 1.64 Billion to them? Probably not as much as it would be to us.
PS: Did you forget to change the time on WordPress for Daylight Saving Time? WordPress doesn’t use the server time, it using a UTC function and then you specify the offset. Since I checked this Blog after 10:51, and there was no post, so I’m assuming that should say 11:51?
Sonia
March 24, 2007 7:55 pm
From what I’ve read on the net and is a public knowledge, Google knew that YouTube would be a huge liability and thus reserved $500 millions from the buyout price against potential lawsuits. So they approach Viacom with an open checkbook.
Viacom is also interested in Google business, because Google pays for the bandwidth.
Anyways, the way this process turns out could be interesting from the end users’ legal prospective, since as the result the end users can get more rights for peer-to-peer file sharing or these rights can be taken from them.