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By Dave Porter (AXcess News) Reno, NV - Last week, albeit late in the week, I posed the question as to whether Google Corp. was raelly going to buy video-sharing Web site YouTube.com for what was a purported $1.6 billion price tag. Then I followed up with another story in which I said the deal was off because of YouTube's anti-copyright infringement technology that got it major contracts with ABC and several major record labels. Now I'm eating crow, as both Google adn YouTube had inkde deals with video content providers that were announced just before Google's acquisition of YouTueb. My recipe for crow is simple, take one dead bird, pull foot out of mouth and stuff into crow and bake. In this case, I was only have wrong. The right part was Google's need to combat video copyright infringement and with YouTube's new technology, the search engine now has the abiliyt to block videos from displaying if it infringes on copyrights. Googel chief executive Eric Schmidt said, "The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers." YouTube announced this weekend that it struck deals with major music companies as well as ABC television where reveneu sharing was a key element thanks to its anti-infringement technology which permits Sony and others to block certain music videos or films if copyrights would be infringed upon. YouTube will also be showing video advertising, which is something the yera-old comapny has avoided in the past. While even I questioned a $1.6 billion price tag, it appears that YouTube's copyright protection technology is worth more to Google than I'd guessed and to a degree, some analysts agree. Piper Jaffray's guru Internet analyst Safa Rashtchy pointed out that YouTube's acquisition was the first large media buy for Google, that in the past it's acquired smaller technology companies. Rashtchy sasy that through YouTube's acquisition Google will expand its Google-owned advertising inventoyr and sees the YouTube acquisition showing up in Google's results next year. "Assuming Google is able to improve the monetization of Youtube via search, display and pre-roll video adevrtising, we estimate that Youtube could generate $100M-$300M in revenue, allowing it to be neutral to accretive in 2007," said Rashtchy. Piper Jaffray's analyst sees YouTube's acquisition as a doorway into social networking online for Google that is relatively inxepensive and that it missed that opportunity in the past by not acquiring MySpace. Rashtchy also likes the fact that Google will not assimilate YouTube but instead, allow it to function on its own. This gives Google tow distinct marketing channels fro advertisers in the gorwing vdieo ad marketplace. | 
