After 3 days of heavy speculation, Google has formalized the purchase of $1.65 billion in stock. Google maintains almost 60% share of voice in search, and now they control almost 60% of the video market as well.
If you want to listen in on the press conference announcing the purchase, you can do so here. It's actually pretty interesting; you can listen in on the major investment banks asking various market related questions, such as why they made the purchase in stock (tax breaks) and how they will utilize YouTube in the short term and present. YouTube will stay as a seperate brand from Google video, but improvements will come on both ends.
- Online press conference: http://investor.google.com/webcast.html.
- Replay of the call will be available until midnight Monday, October 16 at 888-203-1112
Confirmation code for the replay is 2260624.
There are a lot of questions about the safety of this purchase from Google's perspective. Google has a search deal with MySpace, but that's a direct competitor to YouTube; will this create friction? Will MySpace block posting of YouTube videos from their pages and curb YouTube's traffic? Will Fox corp. then back out of their content deals and sue YouTube for copyright infringement of hosted content? There could be a major fued here, or there could be a renesance in the online video world.
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