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"Media giant Sony have acquired the online video startup Grouper, according to a press release.  The current management will stay on at Grouper, working with a team at Sony Pictures Entertainment.  Sony have paid the hefty sum of $65 million in cash - far more than any of the so-called \"Web 2.0\" acquisitions to date - reinforcing that video is the hot space right now.  Even so, it seems like an extremely high price by anyone's standards.\nGrouper has three fairly strong offerings in the video space - a P2P network, a video editor and, more recently, a web-based video-sharing service at Grouper.com.  The site provides instant posting of videos to MySpace, Friendster, Blogger and Wordpress, as well as downloads for your desktop, iPod and Sony PSP.  The company is the second largest independent video sharing community, behind YouTube by a long way.  It's also worth noting that Grouper's content is fairly edgy, and it lists even more copyrighted content than its rival - the top rated videos are currently full episodes of South Park, The Simpsons and Family Guy.  They've taken around $5.25 million in funding from T-Ventures (T-Online\u2019s investment arm) and Duff, Ackerman, Goodrich.\nWhere are the synergies?  Grouper and Sony claim that the pairing of connected devices with Grouper's web and desktop sharing will be a big win, and Grouper's P2P platform could also be used for movie distribution.    What's pretty clear is that this is a technology buy, since Grouper hadn't even made a dent in web-based services like MySpace Video, YouTube and Yahoo Video.  \n\n(via)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/08/22/grouper-sold-to-sony-for-65-million/>