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.

Comments

Codec compatibility

[dannyitc]

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.

Re:Codec compatibility

[interiot]

Kind of reminds me of the time when your main source of porn was BBS's, and every once in a while, a really intriguing filename would be sufficient motivation to go off and find a viewer for that image format.

And then along came webbrowsers, and suddenly every image produced was either JPEG or GIF. And it was good.

Re:Mirror

[A beautiful mind]

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'?

Misleading Title

[irokie]

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"

To pay or not to pay...?

[mister_llah]

This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?

Movie "rentals" aren't out of the question, to be sure... ... 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) ...

===

Admitedly, I've tried one (albeit for free, as the network was in beta) ... http://www.ruckusnetwork.com/

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) ... but in the end, would I pay for them?

Probably not.

Someone might, I suppose, but how many need to before it becomes profitable?

Re:To pay or not to pay...?

[Ensign Zatrole]

This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?

I would. There are a lot of TV shows that'll never make it to the country where I live, and if they do, it'll take me several years. Now, I do download this stuff off bittorrent already, but I might be persuaded to pay a reasonable fee to download it legally, if the people producing the TV shows would allow it. Also, I don't have a TV, because the socialist country I live in requires me to pay a license fee to even own a television, even if I never watch the crappy government-owned free-to-air channels.

From TFA

[rbarreira]

The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

Of course they do, VLC is a GPL license project...