Most industry watchers predict that it may not be long until someone does pay YouTube … a lot. With yesterday’s news that Sony Pictures Entertainment bought Grouper, another video-sharing site, for $65 million, it appears only a matter of time before YouTube gets acquired – some speculate for as much as $2 billion. While YouTube itself “declined to discuss how much it would want or whether it was up for sale,” BusinessWeek reports that if the price tag were that high, “the pool of buyers would likely shrink to the major media companies without a significant online video presence.” Which means that “the the very biggest of Big Media concerns” (i.e., those that own the broadcast news outlets) “may not be interested,” according to analyst Robert Routh. According to Routh, writes BusinessWeek, “the Viacoms and Disneys of the world are unlikely contenders because, for that kind of money, they would be better off using their existing resources and digital presence to build their own sites.”
So we may not yet see one of the Big Three picking up YouTube … perhaps they’ll just start creating their own. CNN, it appears, has already done as much.