Our Friend Jon Fine

[jayhenry]

Our friend Jon Fine on the real price Google is paying for YouTube.

Media Centric
The Google/YouTube Come-On
DECEMBER 11, 2006
By Jon Fine

Google and YouTube are dangling nine-figure sums in front of major programming and network players—that is, the Time Warners, News Corps, and NBC Universals of the world. Google calls these monies licensing fees, according to executives who've been involved in the discussions. But some of them characterize the subtext like this: Don't sue us over copyrights. Take this (substantial) payment, and trust us to figure out how we'll all make serious money once we get advertising and revenue sharing worked out.

...read full story

[trash180]

Wow...Thanks, Jay.
As long as they don't screw it up as bad as tv, it could be the uber-network.

Assuming they could somehow painlessly extract money from people consuming youtube content without scaring away the audience, they should find a way to compensate the content creator and the provider/uploader/user. I think that would keep it interesting. Demand is pretty much user controlled. Automatic. There's no dealing with markets or demographics. Meet everyone's needs by offering simply everything. Even to the point of letting the user submit the content if the providers fail to. If it's all in one place, why go anywhere else?
Then google targets the user with a specific sell?...and I dunno, maybe they buy something and it's a win for capitalism?

eh....Whaaat am I talking about?
Anyway...cool article.