Saturday, February 14, 2009

Youtube for sale...

In recent news Google (the owners of Youtube) have announced that they are flirting with the idea of making the video's available for download as opposed to only streaming. This idea however is potentially going to come at a cost. This initiative is being done for the purpose of 2 reasons. The first is to stimulate further creativity and the second to make money in a struggling economy. YouTube is planning on selling their video's for $1US. You|Tube spokespersons have said that since purchasing YouTube they have been looking for various ways to make money from it besides just advertising and although they are not expected to attract any serious content service provider partners they are convinced that this will be a success. The issue for me with this type of thing is that nobody is going to want to pay money for these video's. I mean yes they are entertaining and you can find clips of just about anything, but in an age with Torrent downloading and Rapidshare I can't imagine people paying anything to watch a cat chase a mouse through the garage for 2 min. Although I can side with Google that this is a clever idea, I just simply don't buy it. I can't imagine this type of idea appealing to anyone and I think advertising as a source of revenue is enough at this point. Let us have our YouTube, does everything have to cost money? I find this particularily problematic because we, the potential consumers, are the ones who are publishing and creating most of these videos and now we may be charged for it? And what about getting paid for our own video? Do we get a cut? Now there is an idea!!

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