Sony buys Grouper – Not quite Apple buying YouTube, but interesting gauntlet nonetheless…

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  • on August 23rd, 2006

Sony takes a $65 million cash leap into the video sharing space. Cool.

I just signed up for an account. Pretty easy process. BUT, a nightmare on Safari and not the easy-one click loading process they promised me to WordPress. Then again, I am an no techno wiz.

I have read the chain of Grouper stories over at TechCrunch and based on the valuation, YouTube would be worth $2 billion. Expect the blogosphere and even regular media to be buzzing with this one.

Of course, just a month ago when YouTube was in the media for claiming to be woth $1 billion, the blogosphere was abuzz with skepticism. I took the opposite view and thought $1 billion was a buy . Nice double (in the fantasy world that I live in :) )

It’s an absolute rounding error to Sony so if they can figure out how to work it into their collosal infrastructure, it is cheap. The likelihood of them doing that – let’s just say YA RIGHT ! :) :) :) :) :)

In a cool foreshadowing of their buyout, check out the funny video of Grouper kicking their competitor’s butts:

The video comments that Grouper allows is pretty damn cool as well.

I guess congrats are in order…

UPDATE – Pete Cashmore , a smart web 2.0 dude, says this about the deal:

Where are the synergies? Grouper and Sony claim that the pairing of connected devices with Grouper’s web and desktop sharing will be a big win, and Grouper’s P2P platform could also be used for movie distribution. What’s pretty clear is that this is a technology buy, since Grouper hadn’t even made a dent in web-based services like MySpace Video, YouTube and Yahoo Video.

Also – Minic has lots of blogosphere links on the subject.

If I can just get Mr. Angry to do a 60 secong piece on why Revver is the best of all, things would be great!

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