Viacom drops a $1b bomb on Google today, in this suit. I've been in violent agreement with Mark Cuban from day 1 that this was bad deal for Google and that Youtube had a fundamentally flawed business model. People who talk about Youtube as a community are wrong and right -- it is a community, but the value to Google was never in the community aspect of the site, but in the sheer gravity that occurred when more and more content owned by someone else got put there -- it was the one site on the web where people could plausibly find much of the video they were looking for. And Google wanted to put ads there. Google missed three things about the Youtube deal:
1. People are actually smart enough to find the content they want on the actual web site of the program that produced it. Google actually did copyright holders a favor by training people to look for it in the first place.
2. There is a huge leap from being a tech company to being a media company.
3. Search is what made Google famous, but by buying Youtube they essentially threw in the towel on video search.