Music licensing and rights management has been a major PITA in film and video production. It would be hard to overstate what a complicated area this can be to navigate for a media producer or for a copyright holder. I've seen the difficulties over the years hurt music artists and film/video makers alike.

This seems like a perfect mesh of technology and experience, and clearly, this acquisition is going to make YouTube a more commercially stable platform going forward. I'm wondering whether RightsFlow [rightsflow.com...] will continue as a rights management company on its own as well as an enhancement for YouTube's ContentID [youtube.com...] technology.

I noted this on the RightsFlow Music Services page [rightsflow.com]...

Extensive data matching techniques are used to determine copyright owner information and split percentages.

...and it made me think that Google's search capabilities applied to RightsFlow could enhance RightsFlow as an income channel in itself.