A Day in Paradise

I’ve been waiting to reveal my conspiracy theory about the Google acquisition of YouTube, but then I saw this post about Sun’s Project Blackbox, and decided it was time to let the cat out of the bag.

Project Blackbox, is a mobile datacenter from Sun. About this time last year Cringley reported that Google was working on exactly this.

From Cringley’s article:

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria’s Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn’t matter. To Google’s local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

Sounds a lot like YouTube doesn’t it? One of Sun’s new Blackboxes will hold 1.5 petabytes of data, this is probably sufficient to hold most of YouTubes / google videos popular videos. Drop a couple hundred of these at the peering ISPs and you will have the latency and speed to pipe HD video into any home in the US.

The next step is obviously the YouTube DVR, which you just plug into your network cable and your TV screen, Google will then make deals with the major networks (like we’ve seen following the YouTube acquisition) and you can forget about terrestrial and cable TV.

The last thing I want to mention is the concept that google has to monetize YouTube, and the fear that google will start splicing the videos with commercials. This is not true, and if implemented would take away what everyone loves about youtube. There is no way that Google could monetize YouTube through advertisements to create an acceptable ROI for their stockholders. Google bought YouTube as a stepping stone to grab the largest market share of internet video, which will be monetized once we all sit down in the living room to watch the latest movie releases from YouTube on our big screen TVs. Some people have also mentioned that the stock jump in GOOG prices on the day of the acquisition paid for the purchase.

The move to video is the only way that Google can continue it’s growth as an advertising giant. They have saturated the Web space and need to provide other ways to provide advertising inventory to their clients. This was discussed by Garret Rogers last year.

Whether or not “Project Blackbox” was a surprise to Google, or if Sun even got the idea from Google, I doubt that it will have much effect on the final outcome of what Google’s larger plan.

So here’s to hoping that when Google owns the internet, we don’t wish we had Bill back!