We spoke with Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-founder of YouTube, at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford. We had a good chat with him after his panel moderated by the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher. When Kara asked him about Microsoft, he told the audience that Microsoft wants to make a “clone” of YouTube.
We are intrigued by a coming battle for community generated video and how those clever folks in Redmond will lay claim to this world with their yet to be announced program code-named “Warhol.” Beet.TV interviewed MSN’s Todd Herman who told us that Microsoft will catch YouTube.
We asked Chad about the coming battle with Microsoft. He likened the situation to a past industry slugfest where Yahoo! tried to enter the world of online auctions occupied by eBay. Yahoo! did not catch eBay, and Chad knows a thing or two about eBay as well, as he was a founder of PayPal which was sold to the auction giant.
Here’s a transcription of his comments on Beet.TV. I asked him to size up the Microsoft effort. Here’s his response:
“I think we’re in a good position because we have created a marketplace for video and it is this this natural network effect that we’ve created where we have the most content becuase we have the largest audience and that’s going to keep continue to drive each other.
Both sides, both the content coming in and and the audience we’re creating. And it’s very similar again to the eBay issue where they had an auction product that gained critical mass. Yahoo! came by and started creating their own technology, potentially better technology, but they didn’t have the consumers there to pull it off. So we feel we’re potentially in the same position with our video site.”
ZDNet’s Dan Farber is blogging the AlwaysOn conference and has a great article about Chad and the panel moderated by Kara. Find his post on his ZDNet blog, ‘Between the Lines’. Bambi Francisco at MarketWatch also has very interesting interview with Chad.
Hey, thanks to Reuters reporter and blogger Ken Li who references our post on his cool new Media File. Ken’s a great guy and savvy journalist who we have admired for so many years for his work at the Daily News and The Industry Standard. Much obliged!
— Andy Plesser and Kate Lyon from Palo Alto, California
YouTube, Microsoft, Chad Hurley, AlwaysOn, Community Generated Video, Community Generated Content, Codename Warhol
