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Google Launches Pay-Per-View Web Video
Elliot Shepherd writes "According to John Batelle, on Monday Google is launching in-browser video playback based on VLC. Google has been accepting video uploads in April, including allowing the video owner to specify that payment is required, through the Google Payment Program." Update: 06/27 22:21 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "Google Video is now up. The about page describes what kinds of content has been uploaded to their servers so far -- mostly a random assortment of stuff from Gamespot's archives, a few things from Greenpeace, a Google recruiting video, some breakdancing videos, and other randomness. The in-browser video plugin works seamlessly (although Windows only for now). Looks like it has potential." Check the top entry on Google Blog for a few more words on it, too.
With VLC's ability to play pretty much any codec under the sun (including microsoft and realmedia's proprietary formats), maybe we'll begin to see more out-of-box compatibility with competing video players. I bet a lot of end-users are tired of codec searching any time they want to watch a certain video.
This seems to be a bot, judging by the posting history.
Good thing. At least now i don't have to wait for someone linkify things in case of slashdotting. Couldn't we get this thing included into 'Related links'?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
they just happen to have this insane amount of cash. I much prefer their way of spending the cash to the microsoft way : buying patents & sueing people.
The filosophy of all the semeingly nutty google projects is pretty simple : start 10 projects in the hope that one of them becomes wildly successfull. The other 9 are just duds
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The title of this story is completely misleading. Google aren't releasing a pay-per-view thing. In fact, TFA said that those videos which were tagged free were the ones that would be available at first...
"Plenty of folks uploaded video to Google with a payment option, and that has yet to roll out"
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?
... but if the service is akin to, say, a subscription to CNN.com or something... I am not sure how well it would do (heck, any pay-for-video service on the web, I just am not sure on how it would do) ...
... http://www.ruckusnetwork.com/
... but in the end, would I pay for them?
Movie "rentals" aren't out of the question, to be sure...
===
Admitedly, I've tried one (albeit for free, as the network was in beta)
Essentially its needs its own web browser, so I guess technically Google's got a leg up (and their video format is different, Ruckus uses WMV)
Probably not.
Someone might, I suppose, but how many need to before it becomes profitable?
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Im not sure that this particular project is outside of Google's remit. Essentially they are an information storage and retrieval company and this new tech seems to fit that pattern.
GBrowser probably doesnt (didnt) but this is a company that encourages staff to explore their own avenues so there is bound to be some diversity.
Anyways, if this is what they're about, the consistency behind all their new forays, then maybe Microsoft's already lost the battle to Google, but they're stuck on what no longer matters as much, which is people's relationship to the computer.
Yes, Google is gaining a lot of momentum, and simply because of their good reputation, simple marketing tactics from a certain large company doesn't seem to work alone to beat them; the redesigned MSN Search seem to have hardly even put a dent in the natural association people have come to make between web searching and Google, and in hindsight must've been a more or less total failure and waste of time for Microsoft.
Then Microsoft made another attempt but it remains to be seen if this service, still in vapor form, will be able to compete with Google Maps. Yes, it seems to look good, but what about its speed and feature set? World coverage in high resolution? Can't tell from the screenshots. If it's about the same as Google's, I think Microsoft will fail horribly once again. "Googling for maps" is quickly becoming as natural as "googling the web".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Of course they do, VLC is a GPL license project...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
- A Full-fledged Word Processor/Spreadsheet
- Full-fledged Image manipulators (vector, raster, 3D)
- An IM client
- Lots of games
- IDE for any [or all] languages
- Various other niche-market software
I'll still care about what OS I have, and my OS will not be obsolete or fade into obscurity.Oh, and don't forget about those people out there that would rather not rely on one source for all of their content/tools (even if for now the source is not evil).
I've got a funny feeling the GP wasn't meant to be a direct transcription from his conversation ;-) I cannot believe you actually thought the entire thing was a verbatum replay of the conversation! Its pretty clear he is trying to convey that at least of the time they spoke to him they really had no answers to the most basic questions reguarding the service.
If this conversation really happend or not I don't know, but having three words you don't think are a direct quote from Google when its pretty clear the whole thing isn't a direct quote as a reason to question the sentiment behind post seems illogical. Of course they didn't say exactly that. I'd highly doubt they said EXACTLY anything attributed to them above, but I wouldn't be at all suprised if the basic concepts are pretty accurate.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
"But with Google in the bandwagon, I guess this problem can be solved with a win on the open source front :-)"
Or realistically google will just create a special version of VLC in which they license the proprietary codecs and OSS and VLC gain nothing. That or they will transcode everything into an OSS and patent friendly format that VLC can play without running into any patent issues.
Either way there are no guarantees that this will help OSS in any way or help VLC with its patent issues. Sorry to be negative but its completely naive to think that google will somehow magically fix the patent issues surrounding VLC. That's just wishful thinking.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Hate to harp on this:
Can google be your highly optimized data warehousing solution? Can it provide customized applications for the countless stores and factories and businesses of the world? Can it offer a flexible data interchange solution? I didn't think so. Whereas they may very well have the recreational user market cornered, almost all of those recreational users pay for their internet connection. They pay using money they make at their jobs. They make money at their jobs most likely using a computer. Those computers run all the stuff I mentioned above. Operating systems as we know them will never die because of exceptionally good content brokers like Yahoo and Google. Operating systems as we know them will die when the network is so fast that applications are easier (and more cheaply) stored on a server and accessed from terminals.
Whenever you come up with a theory about america in general, you have to put $ first. And nobody does that better than M$. I'm betting on them, no matter what amazing beautiful things google comes up with and no matter how shotty of a job M$ does of running their business. In the car industry there was a Toyota to kill GM. In the OS industry... I don't see anything yet.