The new-media paradigm of on-demand, downloaded, streamed and shared digital video is the powerful catalyst behind the Google-YouTube deal, which will become a growth driver for all content players smart enough to heed the call. Google's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube underscores the importance of interactive video even to an Internet juggernaut whose statistical mastery of word search and human behavior has sputtered through the image business from maps to video clips to stock photos and mash-ups. Google will do for Internet video what it has done for the printed word: provide consumers with the level of findability, access and function that powers future interactive media economics.

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