FastCompany has a story about the huge commercial success of the US Major League Baseball video website. I nearly skipped reading it as I am not a baseball fan and also did not think that video distribution on the web is such a great story to read about. But we had recently the pleasure to look into sports video online distribution as well for a new assignment, so I was primed to read this article. I am glad I did as it unveiled some very interesting news for me. While the US Baseball association is not supposed to be one that by nature links itself to high-tech due to the game itself and also the fact that more middle age and older people like the sport, with this video site they are at the cutting edge. Now here the story in numbers:

• started the project in 2000 with $75 million investment from 30 clubs (each club
  put in the equivalent of a yearly salary of one middle infield player)
• 2005 revenue: $236 million, 2007 revenue: $450 million
• they now also run the video sites (provide hosting and services) for other US sports organizations such as U.S. Figure Skating Association, Major League Soccer. The videos of an NCCA basketball tournament were shown online through them as well, which drew 17million viewers
• the money comes from a yearly subscription fee of $89, which is cheaper than the yearly cable TV subscription

I am quite sure this story contains a lot of truth, and shows e.g. how "social" the social video network guys who are now owned by Google actually are.

The top story in today's Wall Street Journal Technology Europe section is the news that DailyMotion, the French equivalent of Google-owned YouTube, has raised another $34 million from Advent Venture Partners LLP of London, and AGF Private Equity of Paris - a division of Allianz AG. This comes on top of a $9.5 million sum raised in October from Atlas Ventures and Partech. Such unusually high amounts for a European Internet startup (YouTube had only raised $11 million before they sold to Google) show that a time-to-market race has started, with YouTube now pushing into international markets as well (they just opened local sites in France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the U.K.).

Whether these investments will pay off for DailyMotion also depends of course on how illegal copyright material can be weeded out from the site. Google so far has not had much fun with its expensive YouTube acquisition, getting drawn into many copyright infringement cases. They are a nice cash-rich target for that. Anyone who might be looking at acquiring DailyMotion will have that in mind, which makes a trade sale exit somewhat unlikely. So the only other exit would be an IPO, which requires that DailyMotion makes a good profit over some time. The goal now is that the new money raised brings them to that stage. Not an easy task though I would think.

• The big news these days comes from Germany where the economy is in a sustainable growth as has not happened for a very long time. All indicators are positive and finally unemployment is also dropping showing that companies indeed foresee a longer-term positive outlook.
• While the future is in wireless mobile, there are still many reasons why the mobile user experience is bad. (not only because 3G does not deliver adequate data speeds) CrunchGear now aired its opinion with its 10 Reasons I hate Smartphones.
• Microsoft handed out its upcoming Apple iPod contender Zune for a review. Read things here.
• Google's business development people seem busy these days to keep the YouTube content legal by negotiating with content providers on one hand and preemptively taking off delicate content to avoid big lawsuits. The latter is now becoming interesting since Google - unlike YouTube before the acquisition - is a nice deep-pocketed target for the entrepreneurial people who keep the economies humming: lawyers.
• In the meantime a Spanish court ruled against the Spanish music industry association Promusicae which was (it seems to me) seeking a representative case ruling against music sharing practices. The court said that the private person was able to show that he used the music downloads for private reasons only and had no business in mind. I guess Promusicae needs to look for another case now...
• Italy's infamous ex-country president Berlusconi's media company Mediaset might be buying the major German private TV station ProSiebenSat.1. The deal is not done yet although it seems well advanced. So still a chance to say -(like German ex-chancellor Schroeder not too long ago): " You are not welcome here!"
  

• What was long expected seems to have happened now. Both Facebook and YouTube might be up for sale. Facebook turned down an offer for 750 million USD in March and seems now worth the 2bln USD that they were asking for at the time. What a difference 6 months can make! Once more, Good Morning Silicon Valley sums it up nicely: "To inflate YouTube, pull cord, stand clear"
• Back in Europe, German's Deutsche Telekom have been found in the headlines quite a lot recently. Either it is about their US spectrum auction activties, pressure from its private equity shareholder Blackstone and others to replace its CEO, or now, as the CEO himself has announced (sounds desperate and not only to me) that he plans to completely restructure the company. In between one can read from other D-Telecom execs that they have everything under full control. To me this sounds more like a "Houston we have a problem" call.
• The news in the tech community yesterday was that early Skype backer Magnus Lund is at it again with its online brokerage startup Zeeco. What's so special about an online stock broker site? They want to offer online trading for FREE! So finance it with ads. What a courageous step. At least they already have the headlines. But I expect it will be much tougher to make this one succeed since they will have to fight many established, deep pocketed competitors. Techcrunch mentions other reasons too.
• At Siemens in Germany a decision for 30% higher board member salaries has received severe backlash but also some comments from people who think this is justified since Siemens is doing fine currently and also needs to match salaries with other companies. Timing is never a good one for increasing salaries of the top management of course, but the idea that this will finally bring in real top management, able to solve big problems instead of simply getting rid of them, is pretty doubtful.
• How to use Digg and Netscape to generate more traffic on your blog site has been shown by this fellow - and he tested it successfully with Guy Kawasaki's blog site.