« Always Steal from the Best | Main | Borders Dumps Amazon: Bad for Both? »

Latest Stories

• Bubbles are Good For You Because ... They Are
• Quote of the Day: Commodities Markets
• San Diego Homes Bottoming?
• The Myth of the Angel Investor
• Pete Peterson on Subprime, Bailouts, etc.

March 22, 2007

The NewTube (NBC + NewsCorp + YouTube Clone) Playbook

If you had to hypothesize a playbook for how life would go, post-GooTube (i.e., after Google bought YouTube), it would go something like this:

1. Google tries, with some limited success, to negotiate distribution/rev-sharing deals with major media companies.
2. At least one major media company is unhappy with the terms offered and sues Google for copyright infringement. It gets oodles of bad PR.
   
3. After long and difficult talks, and after seeing the above lawsuit's costs and inherent poor PR, some media companies finally put their differences aside and launch a YouTube competitor.
4. The above service takes longer to launch than expected, doesn't flop, but is full of mostly traditional broadcast/cable content and doesn't change much for YouTube. Both co-exist happily.

That is pretty much what is happening this morning with the utterly unsurprising news
that NBC Universal and News Corp have banded together to launch a
YouTube-like site which is set to launch this summer. Quel
non-surprise.

So, will it work? Sure, if by that you mean "Will NBC and Fox now have a controlled environment via which to sell their content?" Yup, that's what they now have. The bigger question, however, is will consumers care or know the different -- or, to put in a YouTube spokesperson's parlance, is content type flattening, thus blurring the edge between broadcast/cable and the rest, the same way that cable blurred the difference between it and "real" (i.e., broadcast) television?

The positions are now neatly staked out, with GooTube taking a creator-agnostic approach, one that wants to license traditional content, but also says your non-pro stuff s on par with a network's half-hour sitcom -- an assumption that will be wrong, on average, but true at the very large margin -- and NewTube taking the pros-only perspective you might expect from an incumbent. There is room for both, of course, and both were inevitable -- the only surprise is that it took so long.

[Update] Mike has posted something I've just heard from a Google-er via IM as well: Google insiders have already re-christened NewTube as "Clown Co". While that's amusing, and I'm no NewTube booster, it is another reminder of the growing arrogance at Google HQ.

Sphere It   |   Digg it   |   Bookmark it   |   Stumble it

Comments