October 9, 2006
The blogs are buzzing on the news of Google acquiring YouTube. Plenty of people have been musing about the intellectual property issues surrounding YouTube, the competition with MySpace Video, and Yahoo’s failure to acquire. And YouTube has been busy striking all sorts of interesting deals with traditional media companies. But no one’s really talking about the real loser in this deal: Adobe.
YouTube pioneered Flash based video presentation for the public internet, but they did it using Adobe’s technology. Now everyone is using Flash for online video. Simply selling Flash creation tools doesn’t seem to me to be an incredibly interesting business compared to the possiblities of monetizing the content which are disproportionately larger.