YouTube gets new friends, humiliates new weblog

OK, so I had to post about how I didn't see YouTube's whole business model working out for them. I had to point out, just two days ago, how they were fighting an uphill battle against Copyright itself. And I even had to pen a sentence that pits Warner, one of YouTube's few copyright-owning friends, against Universal, a company full of scorn and indignation towards everyone's online video distribution hero.

And all this only so that YouTube can go out and embarass me today by getting archnemesis Universal to switch sides! The Register reports.

But here I go on painting myself further into the same corner by saying that YouTube's business model, while more interesting than before, still lacks an important bit: that of revenue. Now it's paying for bandwidth and content. Some of the free lunches it's handing out just got more expensive, though at least they're no longer stolen. Shave a few percentage points off the likelihood of the arrested scenario, and add them right to the bankrupt case.

Good luck to YouTube, anyway. Maybe I'll even start rooting for them, for real. There's a moving, naive element to their apparent, infectuous lack of common business sense. Ah, or maybe they are geniuses. We'll see.