It's been rumoured for a long time so I'm not surprised. Whilst this is probably good news for end-users (as YouTube can benefit from Google's bandwidth and search technology and, presumably, merge content with Google Video) I can't really see how YouTube can be worth $1.65 billion. It seems ridiculous for a site that, according to The Economist, is loosing $500,000 a month! No amount of advertising sales is ever going to cover that and I also wouldn't be surprised if there are some very high-profile copyright cases brought against YouTube soon, given the amount of basically pirated material up there. So, yeah, well done - they bought a license to loose money that could well just be a passing fad (as, let's face it, 99.99999% of material on YouTube is absolute drivel).
I actually prefer Google's version, since their player scales according to the size of the browser window, while youtube videos are perpetually pretty much stamp-sized.
This is a questionable decision for Google. To avoid being sued into oblivion, they will have to remove all copyrighted content. Many users of the service will then be forced to go to another youtube style startup.
Surely, that's never stopped companies before from suing.YouTube's real protection from copyright lawsuits suits was the fact that they had no money.
I actually prefer Google's version, since their player scales according to the size of the browser window, while youtube videos are perpetually pretty much stamp-sized.
Am i the only one who has the feeling that Google is in reality a very VERY EVIL orginisation? Like, Wolram&Hart evil...
Don't know, i just feel that behind all the "free-ness" and "goodness" they try to perceive, there is pure evil. Even more evil than MS. At least MS takes your money and get on with it...
google never takes money from us.
I don't think they're evil, however they do seem to be going down the same road as Microsoft. They develop one ubiquitous application and then, in an attempt to stay cutting edge, try and expand into loads of different areas too fast. When they realise they've spread themselves too thin and that small specialist applications will always be more cutting-edge and relevant than large monolithic organisations they simply buy up the small developers and assimilate them into the mass.Am i the only one who has the feeling that Google is in reality a very VERY EVIL organisation?
...loosing ... loose ...