YouTube has to move fast to prove it has a future

Sunday, February 11, 2007

With 35 million regular users and a reputation at the cutting- edge
of cool, the video-sharing site YouTube.com was the happening new media
company of 2006. It won Time magazine's award for Invention of the
Year. Savvy media commentators joked: "The revolution will not be
televised. It will be YouTubed."







Established giants of the digital era seemed to agree. Google paid
$1.76bn (£840m) last September to buy YouTube from its founders, the
former PayPal employees Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Then
trouble started. Old media companies, whose content make it a
compelling online destination, began to demand payback.


Before Google, YouTube's image as a democratic, non-commercial
entity shielded it from lawsuits. But once in the behemoth's embrace,
music, television and film companies asserted their copyright. YouTube
signed short-term licensing deals with the likes of CBS, Vivendi,
Warner, Sony-BMG and Universal Music, but the daddy of all new media
questions is hanging over it: how to monetise an anarchic user-uploaded
business model.



Related Article...





Technorati Tags: ,

Posted by USA Tech News at 9:42 AM  

0 comments:

Post a Comment