Old Model Versus a Speedster

OLD MODEL VERSUS A SPEEDSTER
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Richard Siklos & Bill Carter]
When YouTube emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular Web sites last year, many TV executives dismissed it as a flash in the pan -- and a largely illegal one at that. But after Google agreed to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube in October, they adopted a radically different stance: suddenly they wanted to take it on. Now, a handful of giant media companies, like NBC Universal, the News Corporation, Viacom and possibly CBS, are close to announcing a new Web site that will feature some of their best-known television programming and other clips in an attempt to build a business for distributing video on the Internet to rival YouTube. The new business could be announced as soon as this week. Whether or not the new venture goes ahead -- and such a collaboration among these companies would be nearly unprecedented -- the flurry of activity around its creation underscores the complex and high-stakes dance that media companies are having with new online outlets for their wares, and the potent combination of Google and YouTube in particular. Executives from the companies have been in intense negotiations over the ownership and management structure of the new entity -- which is as yet unnamed -- and the talks could continue until the end of the year or fall apart entirely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/technology/18youtube.html
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