Stan Beer
Tuesday, 10 October 2006 14:43
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A few days ago, an analyst and a billionaire were predicting that YouTube would be sued into oblivion. Today that possibility seems very remote unless Google also gets sued into oblivion. Google has just agreed to buy the popular YouTube video site for US$1.65 billion.
Rumours of the Google acquisition, which will
be 100% stock based, surfaced late last week, after YouTube, which has
just 60 staff and is less than 1 year old, publicly set the asking
price at US$1.6 billion.
Two weeks ago, billionaire internet and media investor Mark Cuban,
according to a Cnet report, told a group of advertisers that only a
moron would buy YouTube and that the site would eventually be sued into
oblivion because of the numerous copyrighted clips on the site.
Cuban's opinion was later backed up by Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff,
who compared YouTube to the original Napster which sued and forced to
shut down
Apparently, Cuban's fellow billionaires Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt don't agree with his view of YouTube.
Neither does analyst Richard Holway of UK technology industry research
firm Ovum, who described the merger between YouTube and Google as a
match made in heaven.
"I cannot think of a better suited couple," Holway wrote in a research note prior to the announcement.