Mark Cuban and Jason Calacanis think so.  The death of YouTube is just a matter of time and lawsuits that threaten to drag the popular online video site into the mud.

"Cuban breaks YouTube down, and our thinking is in synch (it normally is):

a) take away the copyrighted videos and YouTube is just another hosting company and
b) YouTube is the new Napster and their fate will be the same.

More here: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/09/17/the-coming-dramatic-decline-of-youtube/

Also, I don’t think any of the big media companies are desperate enough for YouTube’s traffic to buy their company/impending lawsuits and collapse. "

The only thing that stops me from agreeing with Cuban and Calacanis (the two C’s) is the size of YouTube’s audience and the ease of use.  Let’s face it, if you want to compare YouTube to Napster, and you can, you’ll see the parallels yet the two situations are not identical.   Putting that aside, Naptster was not easy to replace - it took a couple of years after Napster collapsed for other services to find a way to do the same thing and charge for it.

Would you want to do the same thing to YouTube….are people going to pay to upload and download free videos….the whole point of this thing is it’s freedom, and "free" price.  Get rid of YouTube and you leave a big gapping hole - if YouTube is having a bunch of lawsuits - won’t the sites that wish to replace it have the same issues?

And what about the cost of streaming all this video…does anyone really want to go there?