Michael Lynton and company at Sony Pictures Entertainment had no worries about trawling for the second-largest independent video community and catching Grouper in its net.
That billing as second-largest video community is accurate, but there are quite a few sites between Grouper and YouTube, the runaway leader among all video sites. According to research from Hitwise published in May, Grouper placed 8th in the top ten video sites in terms of market share.
A half-dozen big names sat between number one and number eight: MySpace Videos (News Corp), Yahoo! Video Search, MSN Video Search, Google Video Search, AOL Video, and iFilm (Viacom).
Sony’s efforts to catch the public’s attention in a positive have largely floundered in the US. The iPod continues to swim ahead of the teeming school of competitors thanks to a sleek design and simple interface. Their PR has taken successive hits over the use of a DRM rootkit on music CDs, and their role in producing the batteries that have been involved in several incidents of bursting into flame in Dell laptops.
If Sony wants to make the best use of Grouper, they need to be continually aware of this:
Grouper’s primary mission is to give its users the flexibility to take their videos with them across site and platform. Grouper users can browse videos and easily post them to a wide variety of third-party Web sites, such as their personal pages on MySpace, Blogger and Friendster. Grouper’s portability is anchored by its robust peer-to-peer video sharing network, which facilitates downloads of high quality uncut original video shared by its members. Its users can download from Grouper.com to connected mobile devices like the PSP and iPod.
Sony has not always played nicely with others, and that has led the company to launch initiatives like the Connect music service and Atrac compression encoding. Neither proprietary offering has found significant market share in America.
Maybe Sony has finally seen the light of day when it comes to content:
Lynton said the acquisition of Grouper is a strategic initiative in the field of digital entertainment and consistent with Sony Pictures’ vision of making entertainment accessible to consumers whenever, wherever and however they want. No immediate changes are planned for the site.
Or maybe not:
Over time, Lynton said there is potential for development of ad-supported and premium content businesses. “Grouper gives us a strong platform for growth,” Lynton said.
All of the competitors ahead of Grouper display advertising, so a desire to monetize Grouper is not a big warning sign. Sony is making all the right noises now, noting the Grouper management team will stay in place and work closely with a team at Sony Pictures.
Welcome to social media, Sony. Mind the little voices inside the corporate arcology calling for proprietary schemes and other insidious things that could keep Grouper from becoming great.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
