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YouTube Won't Sell For Less Than $1.5 Billion
Joel from Sydney writes "According to a report in the New York Post, YouTube has informed potential buyers it won't be sold for anything less than $1.5 billion. The report lists Viacom, Disney, AOL, eBay and News Corp as potential buyers. Given that News Corp purchased MySpace last year for $580 million, is this a realistic figure?" From the article: "YouTube's stated business model is to 'pursue advertising,' but potential advertisers might be skittish considering industry estimates that roughly 90 percent of the content viewed on its site violates copyright laws. And at least one giant, Universal Music, is threatening to sue the company if its artists' songs keep appearing there. As it tries to focus on videos that don't use content owned by media companies, it yesterday launched the YouTube Underground, a contest to 'discover the most talented unsigned bands and musicians on YouTube,' backed by Cingular Wireless, Gibson Guitar and ABC's 'Good Morning America.'"
Estimates for the bandwidth bill are about $1 million per month. They pay for it using loans and venture capital. At the moment, it's a black hole for cash, but that's not neccesarily a problem.
Cost of bandwidth will go down. They may become successful enough that they can start advertising or charging a subscription or something.
I wouldn't be surprised if the bandwidth bill was considerably higher than $1M a month. That was the figure I heard being tossed around about 4 or 5 months ago. YouTube's been continuing to grow at a steady rate all year, so it's probably approaching $1.5M/month.
This guy's the limit!
http://bt.etree.org/
It's a start.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
It's 1 MILLION a month in bandwidth costs.
The Internet Archive, which is a nonprofit, is also in the free video archiving business. Their main concern has been storage, of which they now have petabytes. Making the system friendly to the casual user has been a lower priority, and the Archive has a tiny staff. But you can get an Archive account and upload your video right now. If you have anything of historical significance, please do so.
The Archive has had some problems with bandwidth, but they just moved to a new data center, and that's improving. Last year, they obtained an archive of Greatful Dead recordings, which can be played out as streaming audio. The Deadheads, with their short-term memory loss problems, would play the same stuff over and over again. This was sucking up most of the outgoing bandwidth and interfering with video playback.
The Archive will probably be around long after YouTube is gone. Among other things, there's a duplicate of the Internet Archive in Egypt.
And at least one giant, Universal Music, are threatening to sue the company if their artists' songs keep appearing there.
Collective nouns are treated as plurals, even if their construction suggests singular or uncountable.
The collective noun isn't the subject of the verb, the word "giant" is. The main clause, which should be grammatically correct without the appositive, is "And at least one giant is threatening...".
So when the Republican Nannies got "The Reagans" yanked from airwave broadcast and moved to Showtime, what was that, there? As compared to ABC basically getting yelled at for broadcasting $40 million worth of free heavily biased propaganda right in the middle of an election cycle and in fact "getting away" with it? Which one of these was censored? And which was flagrant abuse of the public airwaves?
My book, podcast