Google and YouTube are proming hundreds of millions to the Time Warner, News Corp, NBC and other major content companies to buy time to work out the legal issues raised by its purchase of YouTube.

Google calls these monies licensing fees. In effect, though, Google appears to be saying “Don’t sue us over copyrights. Take this substantial payment, and trust us to figure out how we’ll all make serious money once we get advertising and revenue sharing worked out.”

By offering these “licensing fees”, Google may be gambling that it can establish YouTube as the default location for finding video content, much as it has become the de facto search for many surfers.
“The theory is that if you were to aggregate enough exclusive content in one place, you could actually change viewing patterns,” says an executive familiar with the cross-company talks.