Sony checks into the game

Today's news in the NYTimes that Sony Entertainment just bought video-share bit player Grouper.com for 65 million is more evidence that we're in a new world of online content generation. While some companies are making some use of the concept of "crowd sourcing," a topic Wired Magazine explored in depth in their June 06 issue, other companies are based completely on it. Grouper was started with a little over 5 million, and its recent sale is another example of people getting in on a collectivist internet concept early and then cashing in big when when someone else actually makes the idea work. Grouper is completely overshadowed by YouTube but was still deemed to be a worthy "gamble" by a media giant needing to stay current.

I checked out Grouper.com for over an hour. It is hard to use, the search feature seemed to be broken, it is slow and 99% of the videos are stupid and terrible. This is a C-minus website at best. The only video I found that even appoached being post-worthy was the 'World's Longest Slam Dunk' - see it below. The best part is the faces of the people watching - it's as if they are witnessing an execution or something.


So I replaced the video with a picture because it was autoplaying everytime this page loaded. That violates the #1 rule of internet video, yet another sign that grouper.com is terrible.