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:
- Google tries, with some limited success, to negotiate distribution/rev-sharing deals with major media companies.
- At least one major media company is unhappy with the terms offered and sues Google for copyright infringement. It gets oodles of bad PR.
- 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.
- 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.
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