Google to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion – Yahoo! News Link via Gizmodo
Hmm. I’m not sure what Google’s intention is here. For a while, I trusted their judgement and figured they knew what they were doing. But their sea of perpetual betas is starting to get old. Yes, I love Gmail. Yes, I love Google maps. Yes, I use writely and calendar and spreadsheets and translate. But they have a million more things that are in a constant state of upheaval. I guess it’s good that YouTube is pretty stable.
I wonder if they’re going to make a lot of changes. Google is much more of a target for the lawsuits that YouTube has been getting over the copyrighted content that people put up. And Google has been much more willing to remove things under pressure from copyright holders (Probably why no one I know uses Google video). YouTube has never really made any money, so I think people hesitated to sue them. Google, on the other hand, has gobs of money. Will Comedy Central stop thinking it’s cute that you can find about a million Daily Show clips on YouTube now that YouTube is Google?
You know what I’d like to see come out of this? A standardized video format. Something I can view embedded in a browser, or streaming, or on my desktop, or wherever, nicely compressed, in stereo, and all that. I don’t want Real Player and QuickTime and WMV and Divx and whatever the heck else you need to watch video. I want one little app that plays one little open source format that EVERYONE uses. Can you do that, YouTube and Google? Please?