Big Names Buying into Video and New Media

Insightful article by Money CNN on Who’s Next after YouTube. In my last post on this topic, I’m curious to see how Yahoo will react. Folks from NYTimes question where Yahoo is headed. Here’s some bullets on some recent transactions on this emerging video market transactions: I quote from the article:

• Sony bought online video sharing site Grouper in August for just $65 million.
• Viacom bought iFilm last year and Atom Entertainment in August for a combined $250 million.
• …AOL, which like CNNMoney.com is a unit of Time Warner (Charts), has bought Truveo and online video advertising company Lightningcast. Terms of those deals were not disclosed but sources estimated that AOL paid about $50 million for Truveo.
• …Heavy.com’s Carson said that larger media companies may wind up looking to scoop up some of the remaining online video sharing sites because they feel that it is easier to purchase an existing business than invest in building up their own.
• But Yankee Group’s Goodman pointed out that News Corp. paid only $590 million for MySpace last year.

Having been throught the first internet bubble at Exodus Communications, I really have to question these big buys for companies with little or no revenue models. Agreed, where there are eyeballs there are advertisting dollars to be earned, but still, 1.65 billion? When will the break even point be?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 7:58 am and is filed under Video, Web Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.