Aug 06
3
VC Investments Continue Apace – YouTube At Risk.
There must be more venture capital in SV than anyone can imagine.
And a lot of it going into streaming video businesses…
How long can it last with gas prices going up, home prices slowing/going negative, and (same in Australia as US) savings at an all time low?
And how will YouTube find a home with all the copyright lawyers in the world just waiting for the money to come in? And it will. And they will then pounce.
I have read a lot of opinion recently about YouTube being sold in a trade sale. I doubt this now. I think that companies like News Corp and others with big check books will not go for this one. If they do, I believe that they run the risk of their assets being able to be accessed in any ensuing lawsuit. And the copyright lawyers are absolutely not going to go too early and run the risk of killing the goose before it lays all the golden eggs.
Regardless of the belief that YouTube is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I believe that there will be strong arguments that refute this position. The number of videos that are being uploaded that have infringing material in them – and I am not just talking about episodes of Stephen Colbert here – is staggering. Every time you see a video with a piece of home made footage with a known piece of music there is a law suit waiting to happen.
Now the question is, what happens to all the other video sharing sites while this game is played out?
Will the Revvers and Reality Digital (who just scored a couple of mil) and others be pulled along in the wake of legal action/IPO etc? Or will the VC's all just run in a different direction for a couple of months?
I think this is an interesting question because I can not see the genie being put back in the bottle. Seems to me that video is going to become the next big thing – and it has hardly begun so far…