Valleywag
There's one problem with owning a site as popular with users as Youtube: you make a lot of corporate enemies. Google, already facing a $1bn lawsuit for allowing clips from Viacom shows on its video sharing site, now faces an alliance of rivals. Two other giant media companies, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and GE's NBC Universal, are announcing today they will pool video from vast array of shows they own, such as The Office and 24, on a new joint web property. What's more: they've struck deals with pretty much all of Google's online rivals, including Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, to give them preferred access to TV shows. Expect, once the new venture is closer to launching, the media conglomerates to flex their muscles — by demanding, as did Viacom, the wholesale removal of their programming from Youtube. What happens if Google's video site, bought just last autumn for $1.65bn, is left only with amateur videos? One mean-spirited media exec tells Valleywag, sarcastically: "Fortunately people can spend hours watching mentos in diet coke."
