By Sean Wolfe

Online video company GoFish said Monday it has agreed to acquire New York-based Bolt Media in a stock transaction valued at up to $30 million.

The combined audience should create the largest independent online video company, outside of Google-YouTube, on the web with roughly 7 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to Comscore Media Metrix, and over 19 million globally.

It also offers a chance for Bolt to put a lawsuit for copyright infringement behind it, filed last October by music giant Universal Music Group.

GoFish CEO Michael Downing said conversations have been ongoing with UMG’s lawyers, and he expects to put that to rest as soon as possible—likely through settlement, but the exact figure remains in negotiation.

Whether GoFish has the capital to pay up on a multimillion-dollar lawsuit is an open question. It went public last October through a reverse merger into Canadian firm Unibio, shortly after it raised $12 million from a consortium of hedge funds, micro cap and individual investors.Given that the acquisition is an all-stock transaction, GoFish’s cash reserves remain largely untapped. Presumably a revenue-sharing agreement with UMG might sweeten the deal as the negotiations continue.

Mr. Downing said he has a good relationship with UMG, owing to his prior experience founding MusicBank, a San Francisco-based music-sharing service he co-founded in 1999 that ultimately tanked for lack of funding in 2001.He took his lumps, but he has since maintained his connections.

“With MusicBank, we were making the first legal subscription model for music, so as a result, I got to sit with all the major labels and designed and constructed the first subscription license model for music,” he said. “We learned from that, and where I think we could be of some assistance with Bolt’s litigation, because GoFish has had a partnership and licensing arrangement with UMG since 2005.”

He also evidently learned a bit about fundraising from his MusicBank experience. That company had been backed by $20 million from music giant Bertelsmann, but it failed to raise a second round.

With GoFish, Mr. Downing elected to avoid VCs, and he chose to work directly with private investors.