From the New York Times:
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.
If this new group can get itself together and mount a challenge, which it has the money and the technology to do, it will still have to carve a niche in the online culture. It's one thing to be able to build a site and fill it with content, it's a whole other thing to attract an audience that is hip, web savvy, and that advertisers will find attractive.
News Corp wants to protect its MySpace investment, which is threatened by YouTube and other more hip online social sites, but MySpace is already becoming old news. It's not likely to succeed.
On the bright side, if this new group gets itself online, we will have another free source for video. That can't be all bad.
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