The heavy hitters had been circling around YouTube for a while, and an acquisition was always going to happen sooner rather than later.  Few were surprised when Google emerged as the acquiring party but some eyebrows were raised at the cool $1.65bn price tag.  It reminds us web veterans of the internet world (i.e. over 30s) of the crazy days of the late nineties.

YouTube is the popular video sharing website, which has been in operation a mere 20 months.  In that short time it has grown at an incredible rate, with current statistics showing the download of 100 million videos every day and a monthly visitor number of 72 million.  The scale of these numbers hasn’t been lost on Google; Chief Executive Eric Schmidt comments “The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission.”  Indeed their user numbers soared a massive 2500% between September 2005 and September 2006.

The numbers are impressive but how does YouTube square up to TV or cinema?  Does it deliver interesting, legitimate and high quality content, or is it a fad, delivering nothing more than the poor man’s “You’ve Been Framed?”  Like many things on the web the quality is variable and you have to look hard for the gems.  For every Godfather 1 or Godfather 2 there are hundreds of Godfather 3s!

YouTube is high on choice but low on quality.  If you have a particular obsession you’d like to indulge, you’ll find an outlet for it on YouTube.  YouTube might well be the poor man’s public access television – watch out for upcoming Wayne’s Worlds.  But dreaming aside, YouTube certainly heightens the need for self censorship, there is no watershed, there’s few controls, and little of the content is meaningfully classified.

Of course in amongst the good stuff, the bad stuff, the beautiful and the grotesque is a significant amount of copyrighted material.  Reruns of soap operas are on there.  You can watch the goals from Northern Ireland’s recent defeat of Spain.  For those interested, there are even classic moments from Dallas, Dynasty, and flashbacks to childhood in the 70s with highlights from the Multi Coloured Swap Shop, Cheggers Plays Pop, and Rentaghost.  (I hoped that particular memory had been exorcised.)

But copyright for these shows doesn’t belong to YouTube, or should I say Google, and YouTube has already spent significant time and effort keeping itself just about on the right side of the law.  It has signed some deals with broadcasters, which are more akin marriages of convenience,  but there is no doubt that the copyright challenge hasn’t yet been met.

Google has steered into choppy legal waters before but does not appear to be perturbed by previous bad experiences, and it must recognise that it has bought an enormous legal liability in YouTube.  Whereas the small cash strapped YouTube business was previously not worth suing (because they couldn’t afford to pay) Google’s pockets are somewhere deeper, and they would be a prize legal scalp.

It seems that if Google was to lose a high profile court case, the dam may burst and it would be coping with a deluge of copyright owners, keen to get recompense for their compromised patent.  However they appear to know how to survive.  The have sailed very close to the wind with their Google Print project.  They attempted to make vast libraries of books available to the public until authors and publishers globally objected.  Throughout Europe and the US various news and media owners, and consumer groups have objected to what they have published.

But Google has the muscle and the appetite for the fight and seems as focussed as ever on realising its ambition of organising the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful.  Schmidt confirms that YouTube will be “one of many investments” that Google will be making in the online video space in the coming months.

They have big challenges ahead, but ultimately businesses and individuals worldwide will  benefit, as the web continues to evolve at a staggering pace.