Sony acquires video-sharing website

Odd marriage of movie studios and DIY video site

Andrew Charlesworth, vnunet.com 24 Aug 2006

Sony Pictures is buying video-sharing web company Grouper Networks for $65m.

Grouper.com allows subscribers to share their videos with others, viewing videos on the site via a Flash player, adding them to a personal blog or downloading them for playing on desktop media players, a Sony PSP or video iPod.

Sources close to the deal said that the direction in which Sony sees Grouper moving is given by the fact that the acquisition is being made by Sony Pictures Entertainment, the movie-making arm of the Japanese giant which includes MGM, United Artists and Columbia Tristar.

Grouper also offers online tools allowing visitors to edit video and add soundtracks and captions.

The mix of Sony-owned film content with amateur audio-video could prove to be enormously entertaining, but professional movie studios are not known for encouraging third-party amateurs to mess with their intellectual property.

Consequently, digital rights issues are still to be agreed with Sony, according to Grouper.

Visitors to online video sites are increasing dramatically, according to figures released by web monitoring firm ComScore.

Video sharing site YouTube entered the ComScore Media Metrix Top 50 for the first time in July, achieving position 40 with 16 million visitors representing a 20 per cent increase on June.

Traffic to MySpace Videos doubled to 20 million visitors, and Yahoo Video saw a 28 per cent increase to 21.1 million.

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