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Google Video Store Announced
acid06 writes "Engadget and BusinessWeek covers Larry Page's talk at CES regarding the much anticipated Google Video Store. The rumours proved to be true and they're really going online with CBS to sell commercial-free episodes of their series. Deals with NBA, Sony BMG and Greencine.com were also announced." From the BusinessWeek article: "The video providers have the option of offering content on a download-to-own or download-to-rent basis. In a sign that content owners will likely pursue different approaches through Google Video, the National Basketball Association will sell broadcasts of its games one day after the event for $3.95. Meanwhile, public television staple Charlie Rose will post his interviews the day after a broadcast, allowing a free streaming for the first 24 hours then making it downloadable afterward for 99 cents each. Meanwhile, CBS is selling episodes of its popular 'CSI' and 'Survivor' series at the standard iTunes price of $1.99 per download."
Have you seen this?
http://pack.google.com/
Info here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Busy day for Google.
We now know the answer to the previous slash article:
If DVD Is Dead, What's Next?
google Video store!
liqbase
So Apple, and now google, have video offerings. Video blogs are popping up all over.... and microsoft is just getting around to launching a music store (that, by the way, isn't even open yet).
] I realize that Microsoft expects to be able to dominate by competing brutally on price, and by leveraging the xbox platform, but how much of a head start are they going to give Google?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Welcome to the REAL cable a-la-carte, where I don't even need a connection to watch my favorite shows, just download them for 2 bucks a pop. If you normally watch 5 or 6 shows with any regularity, over a full 22 episode season, that comes out to 264 bucks a year. How much are you paying for cable yearly?
There is a whole world out there, and I just hope that Google comes to the party and starts selling videos beyond American shores .
We're dying out here in Australia, our local content providers suck arse. They swabble over stations, muck about the times, cut shows mid season, cancel whole seasons, are usually up to 18 months behind the US in delivery. Its beyond contempt.
We are entering a brave new world in video delivery content, finally, a medium that puts the consumer in charge of the loungeroom. Lets only hope that offshore countries are also in for the ride.
TFA doesn't say anything about DRM on the videos you can buy. I quote:
6 4838423-wGEG4V5bN3Q0Pm7bvt0ceWXfYjQ_20060112.html? mod=blogs ):
ne of the more interesting aspects of the Video Store, however, is the fact that they're also making their non-copy-protected content available for download DRM-free encoded for the iPod and PSP (though there's also no word on what it is we're going to have to deal with in terms of DRM on purchased Google Video content).
According to Wall Street Journal ( http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1136438145
Some details of Google's online video service remain unclear, such as how much content owners might charge consumers to download their videos. Google last year had said it planned to allow content owners to charge for videos, but it hadn't activated that feature. Interest in delivering video over the Internet has surged since October, when Apple began offering downloads of popular TV shows through a partnership with Walt Disney Co. Google has developed its own digital-rights-management software to protect downloaded videos from piracy.
So Google is now creating their own DRM. And they have a partnership with Walt Disney. Anyone else feel a conflicting interest here? Yeah, business is business, but I really liked the "do no evil"-mantra. At least I liked Googles _taste_. Buying AOL of all companies AND creating DRM is not what I'd expect from Google.
On the other hand, Apple did it, and most people still like Apple. It's a sad world when the best we can do is hope for the lesser of all evils to win...
...Linux support?
For a company that is internet based and uses Linux heavily on the backend, I'm kind of surprised they don't support Linux more in their product lines to give back something to the community that helped them start up.
I browsed through pack.google.com but didn't see any mention of a Linux offering now or in the future. I'd love to see Google Earth and Google Desktop on Linux, not to mention the video stuff.
Anyone heard anything about this?
They use an active x/firefox plugin, and don't tell you about it. (And funnily enough, MS is going to a stand alone windows update).
:)
http://pack.google.com/common_installer.js
they dont put it in the firefox directory either... its in the google updater directory. Granted, it doesnt do much work, but adding another 50K visual studio plugin to firefox is not good. the idea is good though, one stop updating of internet facing apps. bad implementation. also, the programs google pack installs STILL do their own update checks which is annoying. in fact, after installing google earth via google updater I ran it and it said there was an update available
Most tv shows have a budget under a couple of million per episode. Most tv shows do not make a profit until they hit syndication, which usually requires around 100 episodes in the can.
TV show downloads have the potential to make first run TV shows profitable up front, no need for syndication. But pricing levels of $1 or $2 per show for non-niche shows are beyond reasonable.
Take a look at "Lost," one of the most expensive shows on TV today, they've been doing around 20M viewers per episode in the USA alone. If only 10% of those viewers go to pay-for-download that's $4M per episiode, which is already turning a profit never mind the commercial fees for the remaining 18M viewers still watching it over the air with commercials. At 20% of the audience or just 4M viewers, the revenue becomes $8M which is probably significantly more profitable than any show ever in the history of US broadcasting.
Thus these big-name, big-budget shows should tend to be priced closer to 20cents per episode if there was real competition. Similarly, the shows with smaller audiences often have much smaller budgets (for example an episode of anime usually costs $200K-$300K to produce) and should still be inline with pricing in the 15-30 cents/episode range.
Don't even get me started on video quality - itunes video is far too low resolution, I believe a pseudo-HD resolution of around 960x540 ought to be an absolute minimum considering that MPEG4/AVC1/H264 can do that reasonably well in about 500MB.
Wow, I actually RTFA.
"Besides programming from CBS, the NBA and Charlie Rose, the list of other video material that will be sold through Google includes: old episodes from "I Love Lucy," "The Twilight Zone," and "The Brady Bunch;" music videos from Sony BMG; and historic video from Getty Images."
There is a bit of fuss over a new form of DRM, but It certainly isn't mandatory on the distributors end.
I'm so happy about the twilight zone episodes I dont know what to think!~
"Surprised no one is complaining about the variable pricing. Now the greedy music/movie industry can rip us off with variable pricing and they now have a competitor to threaten Apple with. Hope things don't go that way!"
Variable pricing makes sense. Why should a company like Apple or Google have the power to decide what a video or a song is worth? The content provider owns the material. That person has the exclusive right to charge what he thinks a song or video is worth. The ditributor only has the right to tack on his fee in addition to the content cost. Apple claiming that every song is worth $0.99 is the essentially price fixing. They're leveraging their monopoly in the online music distribution market to dictate the value of songs they didn't even create.
Vote for Pedro
Day-old basketball for four bucks. Oh yeah, that'll be a million-seller.
Okay, Mister Sarcasmpants. Screw Google. Which search engine actually serves valid HTML pages to me?
(Give up? It's MSN! MSN's search page, search.msn.com, is valid HTML! The results pages are too. Time for you to switch.)
For more information, click here.
Google ships DRM.
DRM is evil.
Therefore Google is doing evil.
Liars.
If anyone can possibly make a good and fair DRM system, it's Google.
I don't know if they'll end up screwing this one up and end up just playing along the content providers game but there's a chance that a new breed of fair DRM will emerge from Google.
I think that the DRM concept isn't necessarily the problem. The problem lies in its current implementations.
Well, at least, most of them.
It comes to me that a very nicely implemented sorta DRM system is Valve's Steam. It actually adds value, IMHO. I don't know its innards but it seems to provide some kind of developer platform which abstracts content loading, so that it can be downloaded on demand. A direct consequence of this is that I don't ever need to worry about losing the game disks of a Steam powered game. I can always download them again. I find this pretty neat.