News broke late this week about the impending sale of Blip.Tv to Maker Studios for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. Maker has been looking for a platform outside of the Google owned and operated YouTube and it had been rumored that the company might just start their own competing platform. The purchase will give Maker a pre-established platform with an existing sales staff (to compliment their own) and a proprietary video player.
As time has gone on the network affects associated with YouTube itself have diminished, with creator aggregates like Maker and Full Screen (among others) and networked channels becoming better drivers of traffic. For a large influencer like Maker it makes less sense for them to share revenues with Google, when they can simply keep all of it for themselves.
Maker seems poised to keep Blip as it’s own brand. Questions still remain as to what changes will end up coming down. Blip recently inacted it’s producer application process which is filtering out a lot of potential content from the site. Whether or not Maker will revoke the process, or increase it substantially is still to be determined. With a huge influx of high traffic content one has to wonder if current Blip producers may end up seeing a boost in views. Of course at this stage anything is really possible.