Chief executive Eric Schmidt and other managers have met CBS, Viacom, Time Warner, NBC Universal, News Corp and others, say people familiar with the talks, offering tens of millions of dollars in upfront payments for the right to broadcast their video content legally on YouTube.
Google obviously wants YouTube to be a success since they spent $1.63 billion on the website. They are putting every effort into making sure that YouTube stays as popular as it was before and so they don’t lose all the content they had before as well.
Hundreds and thousands of vidoes have been removed from the YouTube website already due to copyright infringement, which also means that they are losing popularity and traffic.
Some media executives speculate that if Google fails in its effort YouTube could face the same fate as Napster, the file-sharing service that gained enormous popularity seven years ago before the music companies sued it for copyright infringement and put it out of business.
Google could be facing some devestation in the near future if they do not secure those partnerships. Obtaining rights to broadcast copyrighted videos is critical to the success of YouTube (at this point in time.)
