Technology Whore

Friday, October 06, 2006

Google To Buy YouTube?

According to this report Google is in talks to acquire the popular video sharing site YouTube for an estimated $1.6 billion. This comes a week after some very blunt comments by Mark Cuban that anyone who thinking of buying YouTube is an idiot because they have no revenue model and come loaded with legal issues related to copyright infringement on the site.

If this goes through, then Google would be paying almost two billion dollars for a dominant market share. Google already has a competitive video service, so there's nothing to be gained in terms of new technology. Owning the market might be a good deal for Google because this is the future of content distribution for all video from people making faces on their webcams to television shows and feature films. People are going to start paying for this stuff; iTunes is teaching them.