San Jose Mercury News: YouTube, Verizon announce video deal. YouTube plans to announce a deal with Verizon Wireless today to bring user-submitted videos from the Web to mobile phone customers nationwide, marking the biggest marriage yet between a video Web service and mobile phone carrier.
This makes some sense, but it also tells you where media are heading in a not-so-good sense.
Verizon is one of the telecom companies that wants to control our media experiences on the networks it provides. The mobile networks are already pretty much walled gardens — you take what they give you, for the most part, or pay through the nose (or both).
Now the telecoms want to extend this metaphor to the Net, where they are creating a duopoly on wired broadband. The pattern is clear: Control the pipes, make deals with “content providers,” as media owners are called — and the providers will have the deepest pockets.
GooTube, at least, doesn’t discriminate between commercially created videos and the ones created by regular folks. Let’s see how long that lasts in this brave new age of re-centralizing media.