Marissa Mayer did a good job at the Edinburgh Television Festival last year. As the great and good of the U.K. TV industry looked on she explained that the folks at Google are humble geeks who just want to help TV stations get their content out there. They weren't going to be a nasty gatekeeper like Pay TV operators, because their interests were the same - to get the best content to users. At the time I believed her. Now I'm less sure.

Away from the headline-grabbing ongoing YouTube row between Google and Viacom, there's something rather more serious going on.

Venture Beat today point out a quote here from Google's CEO Eric Schmit. When asked on Monday how we should think about Google he explains: "Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system". I wonder how important it is for an advertising system to get the best content to users? What if the alternative has a better advertising yield?

This comes as Google is reportedly about to announce a deal to sell advertising on DirecTV, to add to their existing deal with Dish Networks. Note that the deals are with Pay TV platforms, who make most of their money from the end-user - Schmit's 2nd priority rather than his first.

So, advertising-funded broadcasters take video content from various sources, add adverts and send it out for free to users. Google, on the other hand, takes content (of all kinds) from various sources, adds in adverts, and sends it out for free to users. To me that's a direct competitor, not a partner.

If I were a broadcaster I'd be doing all I could to keep Google down. Maybe there's more to Viacom's gameplan than just trying to negotiate better revenue share from YouTube?