Ok...I'm finally back. Was away, as you know, on vacation last week and this week had been a short one due to the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday. Needless to say, I've been swamped and haven't even had time to read, let alone write.
But now this fine Saturday morning I'm sitting back with some coffee and catching up on reading. I'd read the news that Google bought YouTube and have had the week to think about it. As you know, I've been experimenting with the YouTube service, amongst others, through my other site mip teevee and I have always really liked the YouTube experience as a means to publish content. I also really like YouTube as a source for accessing and consuming content. There is a lot of great content there.
So how did I feel about the Google news? I had mixed feelings. On the one hand it made me worry that the overall user experience might change. The community aspect of it. You can see people already on the site commenting their "good-byes". This feeling I had though, was a small one, and a brief one. The other side of me was thrilled for a few reasons. Firstly, it gives YouTube a lifeline. There is only so long that a service can run for free. They needed some cash behind this stellar offering. Google has that. Secondly, as the continued popularity of YouTube grew and grew, there were infrastructure cracks starting to appear. Slow downs in performance, site unavailability, videos embedded in other sites taking a long time to load occasionally. Video is a bandwidth intense thing - it needs sound, robust, redundant infrastructure. Google has this in spades. Thirdly, Google is an innovator and that makes me feel good about YouTube as well, because as one of the two YouTube founders said (see video at the end of this post) "Two kings have gotten together...the king of video and the king of search." Reflect on this a minute and you'll see that Google can turn YouTube into an even stronger player. YouTube dominates but with deep pocket competitors like Microsoft trying to muscle in with offerings like Soapbox it is important for YouTube to keep outpacing the competition. I think the Google YouTube deal will allow the offering to do that.
My other concern was a legal one. There is content on YouTube that is copyright. As of late YouTube had been closing deals with content providers and that is good. I thought initially that as soon as Google bought YouTube, that the lawsuits would startup right away because Google has money. Seems I was wrong in this initial thinking and it looks like the content providers, like Warner for example, figure, they can either get their money through partnerships or lawsuits...and partnerships might be the better way to go.
Anyway, my congrats to YouTube. I look forward to seeing what the future holds. Check out the video in the continued part of this post - it is the founders of YouTube posting a video just after the acquisition.
YouTube is dead. Look at what is happening already. 30,000 copyright video taken down last week. Now many more thousands of shows like Daily Show being taken down. When all the copyright material is gone will people still go to YouTube to watch people being stupid? I don't think so. Google was stupid to buy them.
Posted by: justin | October 30, 2006 at 01:05 PM