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In checking out the other sponsors for Thursday’s TECH Cocktail DC, I was introduced to Wine Library TV. I’m not a huge wine drinker (I’m more of a scotch guy), but I find myself very intrigued by the show, which is done extremely well; the host, Gary Vaynerchuck, shows great enthusiasm and really makes a topic I wouldn’t normally be interested in compelling. There’s even a whole episode devoted to kosher wines!

And today I noticed that Cork’d, a niche social network for wine-lovers, was acquired by Wine Library TV. The combination of original content, user-generated content, social networking and, most importantly, high-end products that cater to high-income demographics, seems like a good combination. I’d bet that something like this would work for scotch, cigars, maybe even beer (putting aside the issues with selling this stuff online, which can be tricky). It’s nice to see a business model that doesn’t rely on advertising.

Comedy Central, wake up. You owe a large chunk of the success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to the Internets. Why are you punishing the people who love your content? Why can’t you come up with some revenue sharing agreement with YouTube to make this kind of thing work? I’m all for copyright protection, but look at the reality here. If NBC, CBS or ABC came to you and said, “We’re going to put The Daily Show up at nights…and we’ll share some revenue with you…” you would do it, right? I mean, that’s where all the people are!

Maybe I’m pointing the finger in the wrong direction; maybe YouTube doesn’t want to get into these kinds of deals. Why not? Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just throw out my TV and TiVO, and just watch everything the next day on YouTube? Isn’t that why you named it YouTube?

Either way, there’s huge potential here for one of the other video sharing sites to make some headway. As soon as all the copyrighted material is gone from YouTube, people will start to look elsewhere. And wherever they find episodes of The Daily Show or The Office, you can bet they will flock in droves. Of course, there really isn’t a great business model in the old YouTube-style of doing things, but if you can get to the point where you’ve aggregated a large audience looking for quality (i.e. copyrighted/professionally produced) content, and you can strike some deals with major content owners, then you won’t need to get bought out by Google or Yahoo or anyone because you will be making real money.

I usually fight the urge to jump on the bandwagon and comment on the latest thing, but I think it’s instructive to examine the underlying reasons why YouTube sold to Google. The service was insanely popular, but had no business model. Their expenses outstripped their revenues, forcing them to burn through cash. YouTube had no choice but to sell, as without deeper pockets, eventually, they’d have to turn out the lights.

And Google, Yahoo, etc., in some ways, were forced to buy. These guys are all hungry for traffic, users and page views. Without an upfront business model (everyone talks about the new wave of video advertising, but lets face it, there aint much new under the sun), it was inevitable that YouTube would eventually come knocking. And once one of the major players was interested, the other big guys could not afford to ignore it.

It’s a bit ironic, because from a pure business perspective, dollars and cents, YouTube was a failure. But online, value comes in many different colors, not just green, and certainly from the founders and investors perspectives, YouTube is an incredible success. But from a founder perspective, looking at the plan when starting a company, think about how many other video sharing sites there are, and how many of them have even a fraction of YouTubes traffic. You’re better off, statistically, coming up with a service that makes real-world money, than hoping to be the one site that grabs the public attention. There are probably less than seven sites on the web that could work a deal like YouTube did; on the other hand, there’s thousands that are making signficant amounts of real world money. It’s not a bad place to be where YouTube is, but it’s not a simple thing to get there.

As for YouTube itself, well, here’s hoping that it doesn’t become as bland and boring as Google Video.

Rocketboom is pushing the envelope in more ways than one. Rather go the old route and take someone elses commercial and put it in their post-roll, Rocketboom is auctioning off a weeks worth of Rocketboom-produced commercial time. It’s really quite smart; for a price, you get access to Rocketboom’s audience, but Rocketboom gets to choose how to expose your product to their audience in a way that they know their audience will best receive it. It’s funny because, totally unbeknownst to us, Rocketboom has been preparing us for this for quite some time…all those wacky, off-beat commercials they’ve placed at the end of their shows are all advertising, but repositioned in a context that makes the viewer appreciate them as content at the same time their seeing the advertising. And auctioning off the first week on eBay…brilliant!

I had a chance to meet Andrew Baron (the one behind the scenes) at BarCampNY, and besides being a nice guy, he’s got a lots of ideas for the future of online media, from a new perspective. In more ways than one, Rocketboom is one to watch.

Oh, and apparently Rocketboom will be on CSI tonight. Wacky.