As we all learned last week, Google’s efforts to strike content deals with the major media companies, on behalf of their YouTube division, seems to have hit a wall. Viacom pulled all their video clips, NBC accused them of “Mafioso” negotiating tactics, CBS backed off at the 11th hour of deal talks, while Fox and NBC continued to push their vision of launching a big media-backed YouTube competitor.
All such setbacks notwithstanding, it’s still pretty safe to predict that it’s just a matter of time before one of the big media brands caves in and strikes a ground-breaking deal with Google. And maybe not too much longer before Google starts buying programming directly itself.
At the center of such a forthcoming deal will be, of course, money. Specifically, the minimum amount of dollars that Google will guarantee the media company for every year of the deal term. Rumors are that they offered the old media giants as much as $500 million of guaranteed revenues per year, but it wasn’t enough.
