Forget the Imagery – show us the Football…
This article in the Times newspaper caught my eye this morning…
“The English Premier League is suing YouTube (Google), the video-sharing website, for alleged copyright infringement.”
Here in the UK, football is our national game, we love it – we just don’t get to watch it. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television stumped up a billion pounds for exclusive rights to the Premiership (EPL), so the only way you can watch the football is to subscribe to Sky at the princely sum of £60 a month. Logging on to YouTube and watching a game for free is an attractive alternative, and a significant threat to viability of the Sky business model. If they lose their subscribers, they can’t afford the billion pound Premiership deal, they risk going bust – so they go to court.
Here we have parallels with another Google ‘business’…Google Earth. Google purchase their imagery from third party companies, on the assumption it will be used for non-commercial use…but Google seem content to let every man and his dog download Google Earth and ‘use’ the imagery for free. Great Stuff. But such acceptance of breech of copyright, will surely threaten the viability of the imagery providers business model, they will no longer be able to afford the plane, the camera or other overheads, they will risk going bust – is it not plausible, that one day, they too will have to go to court?
Ok, now I know we’re gazing into a crystal ball here, but this is a blog post…
Sky has a market capitalisation of £10 Billion, an imagery provider…maybe £20 Million…orders of magnitude difference. How much will a court case cost Google, a court case they are likely to lose? Much less than buying Sky, but enough to make purchasing an imagery provider good business sense.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Morten
What you forget is that Google is actually buying their data from the data providers, and the dataproviders are loving it. They get to make huge deals with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to produce data for them. It’s not the same at all.
Google is more like the TV in your analogy. Not the broadcaster.
May 11th, 2007
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