By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Contrary Cuban mavblogs YouTube and Google
Mark Cuban has a few hundred words on YouTube and Google at his Blog Maverick [all typos, etc., remain Cuban’s own]: “Would Google be crazy to buy Youtube. No doubt about it. Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime. Would Google be stupid to do a deal with Youtube. Not at all. Would Youtube be smart to do a deal with Google. Thats a different answer. If Google went to Youtube, like they did Myspace and said they would pay them a minimum of hundreds of millions of dollars a year in exchange for letting Google sell text and video ads on Youtube, as long as there were performance requirements it would make perfect sense for Google… Of course Google would build in protections against getting sued into oblivian. Their many lawyers will take care of that…
With Google, they may be probing them to host all those videos in the super secret server farms that host Google servers and probably some black helicopters as well. Like Myspace, they could walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars. Five or Six years, $1.6billion in guaranteed advertising reveue from Google ? Not inconceivable as a deal. Plus it meets the Youtube criteria of not wanting to sell the company… Its not the big companies they would have to worry about the most. Its the little guy. Youtube would get sued by the thousands of rights holders who will seek the maximum amount per download from Youtube for their content. This is where Youtube is really screwed. Youtube doesn’t stream. They use progressive download. So the damage claims are going to be per download and enormous… As I have said many times, that shit aint gonna fly. I dont think so, and neither does a long, long list of copyright owners. We arent just talking big media companies. We are talking fake a lawsuit companies… The copyright shit is going to hit the lawsuit fan. Personally, I think the site that has this handled first is going to be in a great position to leapfrog those who dont. They can be out enabling great user created content and building traffic while everyone else is fighting lawsuits.” [More musing at the link.]