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And, there is no way that YouTube could survive on its own. The last mile bandwidth problem required a Google-sized company to help them solve it. This is usually overlooked.

Legend has it they had like weeks of runway left and didn’t pay any of their bills once it looked like the deal was going to close

I remember Google Videos being better than YouTube at the time, but IIRC it didn't have the amount of pirate content that initially made YouTube popular.

This was borne out in lawsuits. The YouTube tech wasn’t better, GVideo was superior but disnt have the same buzz or content, it was the pirated content Google wanted. The emails are public record.

They had a YouTube. It was called Google Video, and it went nowhere.