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Google Makes Peace With Media Companies
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is bringing some of the biggest media companies into its camp and sharing revenue with them, after drawing their ire last year with moves to search video and books, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Google's improved relationships with media and entertainment companies reflects the confidence those companies have gained in online distribution in the past year, amid rapid growth in Americans' consumption of Web video and other Internet content. But just as importantly, it illustrates a coming of age in Google's approach to the owners of content it wants to search.' Google has hired executives from the media world to conduct the negotiations. One of them, David Eun, formerly of Time Warner and NBC, said, 'The biggest challenge is explaining to them we're friend and not foe.'" Just don't use google as a verb. Pretty please?
When I Google (TM) for a song, why doesn't it show me links to MP3s of those songs on the Web? Or links to pages which link to MP3s of those songs? Google has always (or for a long time) censored its links to that content. I guess they're scared of the Napster caselaw. But that's a pretty big stick they've got to hit "media companies" with when they want to haggle.
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make install -not war
Apple is paving the way
To what, exactly?
If Google can garner a solid relationship with those large media companies, the possibilities for Google to grow are nearly infinite. Many households today do not own a DVR, but imagine how convenient it would be for a typical Joe User to be able to find a clip from CNN he saw earlier and use it for a research project he's working on. Wouldn't it be great if his daughter could find a clip of her favorite program as easily as searching for web pages?
If this relationship can build, this will all be possible. Furthermore, companies that benefit from AdSense will benefit greatly from those types of users. Everybody wins at the end, and Google keeps its "friendly giant" crown it's been holding for years.
No sneaky corpse-beating RIAA lawyers required.
I swear, Google is starting down the road of becoming less and less relevant. It started with search results placement...What I want is a search engine that can filter out all commercial results and just give me pure, clean information when that's what I am looking for.
"Imagine"? I don't have to imagine it. Napster (the original) was well on its way there. P2P networks are clearly doing this already. In fact, P2P networks distribute content in ways that efficiently spread out distribution costs among users (disproving the notion that the cost of "hosting" is supposedly the biggest "challenge" facing content owners --- a falsehood that nevertheless will become an excuse for many annoyances, such as unwanted advertising, and network non-neutrality).
Media companies are no friend in this regard, and neither is Google. Bottom line, people. That's all these companies "care" about. They see one another as foes and/or partners in the effort to control your access to information and the distribution of that information for their own profit.
In fact, in this regard I would say that the content owners, for all that many of us rail against them, are actually better actors, in a sense, than Google, here. Why? Because they are actually in the content creation business to some extent --- part of their argument has always been that the free distribution of content, while nice in theory, would come back to hit the artists, since historically the artists (creators) have been paid using a system that depends on royalties related to distribution (sales of individual copies). Thus they at least claim to be benefitting us by consolidating their control over the distribution of content.
Google, on the other hand, has never been about controlling distribution or content -- its business is based on providing as much access and utility as possible, as a means of sucking in information, which can then be used for marketing and advertising purposes. This is why a deal like this is a sign that Google is getting into bed with content owners, and changing its core business.
Is this the first time the submitter has been a media flack who doesn't even go through the formality of registering a Slashdot account to submit? (Check out where the link from the submitter's name goes.)
-- Old Man Kensey