Chad and Steve (and their investors) have to be glad they don’t own YouTube anymore. After failing to reach an agreement (apparently) with Viacom, YouTube said it will comply with the company’s request and pull the 100k videos. From the WSJ article:
YouTube, a unit of Google Inc., said it will comply with the request. “It’s unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from YouTube’s passionate audience which has helped to promote many of Viacom’s shows,” a YouTube representative said.
Bye bye again The Daily Show.
One of the major keys to YouTube’s growth and success has been the availability of branded, professional content. The idea is: I can type in anything and find related video content. And while many zealous users of YouTube probably would not be impacted by the permanent loss of this material, the “mainstream” audience would find the site less interesting and potentially abandon it over time.
Is Google’s compliance simply calling Viacom’s “bluff”? Is this a high-stakes game of “chicken” being played in public?
Screenwerk 
February 2, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Mark Cuban was right all along. You have to be a fool to buy youtube since a core part of their business model is “borrowing” professional content. All the sudden, the content got significantly smaller and the quality will be as good as some pimple faced kid with a cell phone camera filming his buddy crashing on his skateboard.
March 13, 2007 at 3:20 pm
[…] surprisingly public “pissing match” ensued when negotiations broke down between the two companies, presumably over Viacom’s […]
March 16, 2007 at 5:34 am
I hate Viacom! Stupid suit got all the videos I was watching taken down because of “copy right” infringement. Youtube was great, but now it sucks.
April 13, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I am really angry with google now.
in late february, google deleted over 15 million videos from youtube.
In the first 2 days of march, they came back but after that, they gone again. This is the angriest I have been since google took away google video player.