Same-sex marriage has dominated the world of real news in recent weeks. From the surprising unanimous Iowa supreme court decision to the groundbreaking legislative action taken in Vermont, it's been a groundbreaking time. 
But while same-sex couples now enjoy expanded rights, there's other marriage news front pages seem to be ignoring: The union of media giants ESPN and Youtube.
You can read the press release commemorating the occasion here.
But supposing you'd rather not meticulously pour over a couple thousand words of bureaucratic nonsense, I've taken the liberty of boiling the text down to its essential elements.
ESPN, sports media titan, has hosted video on its own website for some time now. But, outside of live game broadcasts via ESPN 360, these video snippets haven't been a rousing success. But then ESPN noticed the a pretty girl (or maybe boy, it's kinda hard to tell what gender a media entity would be) across the room. This... whatever gendered thing had a very particular niche it filled quite nicely -- online video. Youtube saw in this relationship a chance to latch on to arguably the biggest name in cable. Why wouldn't it want to host daily top tens, and other such short video packages? Still thinking? That's because there's not a good reason. For Youtube, this is an absolute no-brainer. They now get to host exclusive ESPN content.
For the self proclaimed worldwide leader in sports, this marriage seems to be -- if not an admission of defeat -- less of an out and out win. Sure, ESPN gets to host their videos on Youtube. By doing that, they may better satisfy their audience. But the question remains -- why couldn't ESPN just host these videos on their own site? Or rather, why couldn't they do so successfully? To that question, there isn't an obvious answer. Maybe there isn't one at all. Regardless, the fact of the matter is ESPN clearly feels it can benefit from this marriage.
Because, in the media, nothing is done for love -- only profit.
Here's the product of that union.
But that's not the real tragedy. Before actually uploading their own content, ESPN was forced to only have favorites. Now, all of those have been done away with. So we no longer know how ESPN feels about this.
I'm not sure I can live with that.
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