Somehow, I missed the story of Google’s acquisition of YouTube on Monday. It was the Thanksgiving holiday here in Canada so I wasn’t paying much attention to the news. I remember reading last month when Mark Cuban said that only a moron would buy YouTube. Following the Google buyout, Cuban is standing behind his words. So just how dumb is Google?
Up until this point, I have had pretty much nothing but respect for Google’s business strategies and products. They have developed many cool products while continually improving their core search product. They have also made smart acquisition decisions. But my initial reaction to the YouTube news was pretty much the same as Cuban’s. On the face of it, they have essentially purchased themselves a quagmire of copyright violation lawsuits.
The price tag really doesn’t bother me; it’s only money. The danger is that Google ends up having to expend a significant amount of energy fighting a bunch of court battles and distracting them from their primary business (look at RIM for an example of this). On the other hand, one assumes Google has done their due diligence and has weighed out the potential risks and benefits so I’m fully expecting and hoping to be surprised and proved wrong here.
This week I was also pleased to see that I’m not the only librarian who loves HBO’s The Wire. I was also interested in the fact that most if not all of the unaired episodes for the rest of this season had been leaked on the Internet. I’m guessing HBO is not happy about this. Maybe these media companies will finally smarten up and realize that maybe it’s not a great idea to send dvd screeners of an entire season’s unaired episodes to television reviewers.
This trend with which the music industry is intimately familiar (as is the movie industry around Oscar season), is increasingly affecting television. Earlier this season, several unaired episodes of Showtime’s Weeds were similarly leaked. Of course, in music this has now been the status quo for a while. I can think of very few albums in the last three years which were not online before their release dates.
