Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.