Sony Goes Fishing<< Verizon Intros At-Whim Pricing | Main | Movies, Movies Everywhere >> Joseph Laszlo | August 23, 2006, 01:05 PM Okay, bad pun, but Sony's bought viral video site Grouper for $65M, no doubt spurring further speculation about the feeding frenzy (sorry) to come as Revver, Break, Veoh, and of course Youtube wait in the wings. I like the Grouper UI a lot, but like so many Web2.0 phenomena, aside from Google ads it's still very much a cool service in search of a business model. As the first big media company to get into the user-submitted video arena, it'll be interesting to see what Sony does with it. If they're true to form, they'll move away from Flash to some proprietary video codec that no one has a player for...and they'll make Grouper videos totally portable as long as you put them onto a memory stick for playing on your PSP. (iPod download capability? NO!) And the UI will be retooled so that it looks best on a high end PS3 plugged into a Bravia... I kid because I love. |
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