Apple Buying YouTube? Why bother?

For a couple days now, people have been speculating on the notion of Apple purchasing YouTube. There have been arguments from both sides – you can see a pro argument from Robert Young over at GigaOM and a short response from John Gruber over on Daring Fireball. The pro side basically says that YouTube to the video iPod will be the same as the iTMS was to the regular iPod. The con is that YouTube is basically a big repository for copyrighted videos viewable by everyone – and the RIAA and buddies would blow a seal if Apple took part in that.

If I had to pick, I’d be mostly with John on this one. The RIAA would certainly take offense if Apple threw in iPod integration into YouTube, unless they had better editorial control over what goes on there. If Apple takes stricter editorial control over YouTube, well… anyone remember Napster? Anyone heard of Napster since they went legal?

There is something to be said for the fact that the iTMS was one of the things that added some nails in Napster’s coffin, but if you took YouTube, removed the user-sharable stuff and started charging a buck or whatever for videos, you’d be doing what Apple is doing with the iTMS already. A different company could actually try to do this – buy YouTube, get all the IP rights, cripple it so that the RIAA is happy and sue anyone who tries to start YouTubeTwo. I think that this is pretty unlikely though – Apple has certainly been known to take some decisive measures to protect its IP, but it hasn’t really used its legal department to necessarily stifle competitors like certain others tried to do.

Frankly, even if buying YouTube would boost Apple’s video iPod offerings, are they going to bother? I’m really not sure on this one. The current iPods have tiny screens, and you need to shell out $100 or so in adapters to plug one into your TV and get any use from the video features. I really don’t see any sort of YouTube-iTMS or YouTube-iPod integration being particularly exciting for Apple, given the small amount of users I suspect actually use their iPods’ video capability to anything beyond the strictly gimmicky extent. Granted, Think Secret writes that there’s a 3.5″ screen video iPod in the works for the spring but again, I don’t see how YouTube could give Apple anything (legal and) exciting that the iTMS doesn’t.

You know who I’d expect to pull off the sort of dirty trick I described earlier? Our friends over in Redmond. The folks over at Engadget indicated a little while back that the Zune will be basically Microsoft’s challenge to the iPod-iTMS system. Apple already has quite a complete framework set up for content distribution (i.e. the iTMS), but Microsoft doesn’t. Knowing that Microsoft will probably ship a few months late and with half the (working) features promised, it is possible that they will acquire YouTube rather than build their own equivalent. Even if Microsoft doesn’t end up using YouTube as part of their Zune distribution solution, I could still see them buy YouTube out and kill it to eliminate the competition from that front.