Month: October 2006

A Google Job

TV Engineering Project Manager – Mountain View

This position is based in Mountain View, CA.

Television remains the single most important source of information and entertainment for billions of people around the world. Google is looking for a talented Project Manager to be the driving force in managing our cross-functional launch team and stay on task and target. In this role, you will work with Engineering, Product Management, QA, Partner Services, and Business Development to ensure a smooth and seamless release of software products to the market. You will also be responsible for special projects within the Engineering area, driving projects to completion and helping to document decisions and progress.

Hm-Hmmm. The single most important source of information and entertainment for billions of people around the world.

Circle Vision

It’s one of those rare occasions, where I could imagine it might be fun to work in the legal department of big olde media. One day you’re writing the TOS for a YouTube-look-alike (how to distance yourself from all this user uploaded content, whilst still being able to monetize the whole load). Next day, you have to ponder how to sue YouTube (how to transfer Google-riches into our pockets because of copyright infringement of user uploaded content).

Seriously. That’s the German situation. RTL Group, Europe’s largest broadcaster, is running Clipfish. Haim Saban’s ProSiebenSat.1 acquired MyVideo.de. And, not too surprisingly, both sites are virtually pornfree – but laden with copyrighted material. MyVideo hosts a large collection of RTL’s German Idol-version Deutschland sucht den Superstar. Clipfish sports a nice collection of TV Total excerpts, one of Pro 7 main shows. Which might be business as usual. If especially RTL wouldn’t usually fight for (or, better: against) every digital bit and byte. Online video recorder, PVRs, ad blocker, you name it. Seems like web based videosharing will be OK.

Is Google run by morons?

Mark Cuban did put it on the map. Only a moron would buy YouTube. Well, here comes Mr. Google, allegedly offering some 1.6 Billion USD. Whoo-hoo, here we go. Is Google run by morons? Probably not. But they have to cater to analysts (which might be even worse).

I still think: as a business, YouTube is worth a nickel and a dime.
As a buying-growth-scenario, the deal might save Google’s mega valuation for a couple of months. Just look at the latest comScore stats.

TRAFFIC DATA
__________________________________________________________
Select Online Video Sites (Note: Not an official ranking)
Total Unique Visitors (000)
August 2006
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Media Metrix

Total Unique Visitors (000)
Select Sites Aug-06
———————-

Yahoo! Video 21,141
MySpace Videos 19,406
YouTube 19,089
MSN Video 15,414
Google Video Search 11,891

Google Video + YT would guarantee the number 1 spot for at least 6 months. But obviously the people aggregators like MySpace, Yahoo and the like beat Google’s dried up services approach.

Which probably means, they shouldn’t buy YT, but Facebook. But Google buying traffic to save a valuable property? That would be a scary thought. Well anyway. On a mid term perspective, it could always be argumented that it will help solidify Google’s entry as the video ad engine of choice.