Living Google, Loving It
January 8, 2011
I don’t know much about Mark Cuban. I am familiar with his name, and I think he owns an outfit doing metasearch called Ice Rocket. Don’t bet on my memory, however. I read an interesting write up that was part fact, part jab at the Google. Navigate to “Am I Living the Google Lifestyle? You will find some interesting comments about Google’s products and services, but one passage struck me as quite interesting. Here it is:
YouTube’s fundamental business problem is that they are in business of subsidizing ALL/100pct of the bandwidth and hosting costs of consumer and small to medium size business video. That is a huge problem. Our ability to capture ever-increasing amounts of video at ever-increasing bit rates is growing exponentially. How happy are companies like Cisco knowing that the better they make their FLip cameras , with more storage and better resolution, the more money Google/YouTube has to spend as people host it on their servers and use their bandwidth to show to their friends and family. Of course it’s also costing Facebook more and more money. Which has created an interesting dynamic as both compete to host video.
I think this is ambiguous. On the surface, it is a useful insight into Google’s attracting customers with free (subsidized) services. However, the other angle suggests to me that Google can enjoy the steady increase in costs required to make video free.
My view is that Google has lots of cash coming in. Subsidizing works. Just ask Mr. Cuban.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2011
Freebie
Comments
One Response to “Living Google, Loving It”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stephen E Arnold, Google News US. Google News US said: [wikio.com] Living Google, Loving It (Beyond Search): I don’t know much about Mark Cuban. I am familiar … http://bit.ly/gu6y7k #google […]