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Google Video Not Ready for Prime Time?
elfguy writes "Ars Technica has a piece on the Google Video Store, and their opinion is that it seems a little rushed to market. The interface is very bad, with paid and free videos mixed together. While free videos can be viewed in Flash on any platform, their paid DRM'ed videos require a Windows program, and the page tells you the available formats only after you purchase it." From the article: "As I pointed out in my coverage of the keynote, for all of its evangelization of open standards, Google has done an about-face with the video store. Not only are the videos protected by DRM, but Google has gone and rolled its own home-grown solution instead of using one of the current solutions. On one level, that makes sense: Apple doesn't share its DRM, and Microsoft is Google's biggest competition. However, inflicting yet another flavor of DRM on the public goes against the desire of many in Congress and in the consumer electronics industry to see a single, unified standard emerge."
..... Their "Do No Evil" mantra by coming up with such a crappy UI and yet another DRM?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
What part of beta do these people not get?
. The interface is very bad, with paid and free videos mixed together. While free videos can be viewed in Flash on any platform, their paid DRM'ed videos require a Windows program, and the page tells you the available formats only after you purchase it.
:) )
The interface isnt bad, its just simple (which is good in my books). There are links which let you view only the free/paid content or both. The search works pretty well.You could call the interface minimalitic but what else did you expect from Google ? The DRM (working on Win only) is something they should work on (or lets hope eliminate all together
I love Google, but I am tired of this 'it's in BETA' excuse. They have had stuff in beta for years it seems. Look at their news and email services... they are still in beta! So if problems occur, they can just blame it on being in beta?!?!? I think not.
http://religiousfreaks.com/I am not sure what the fuss is about...
:o)
The interface is not all THAT clunky, but releasing in BETA for a very long time is generally what they do for just about everything. The Google search itself was considered beta for, what, close to 3 years... GMail is still beta and they have millions of Gmail users.
Now they big fat wallets - does that mean they will do things differently?
Not likely.
Homer: Facts are meaningless, you can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true!
What part of beta do these people not get?
Ahh, so you subscribe to Microsoft's definition of "beta", which means that it stays up long enough to do some amount of testing, so lets through it at the customers and let them bang the hell out of it.
Beta does not mean that it is perfect, but beta is supposed to be that step just before it does ship, which means you would not expect any MAJOR issues. Not being able to tell if something is drm'ed or not until after you "purchase" it to me falls into the category of "never should have made it out of alpha, let alone into beta". It shows a complete lack of understanding of the users utilizing the system, and why they will most likely fail (even with their FOTM status) while Apple succeeds (it's all about the user experience).
On one level, that makes sense: Apple doesn't share its DRM, and Microsoft is Google's biggest competition. However, inflicting yet another flavor of DRM on the public goes against the desire of many in Congress and in the consumer electronics industry to see a single, unified standard emerge."
Good! Muddle up the field more. The more confusing this stuff gets for the average consumer, the more they'll become aware of DRM and its potenially adverse repercussions.
If Congress and the electronics lobby were successful, we'd be forced into a crappy DRM scheme with little recourse. More DRM is good for us consumers; we can go elslewhere if the DRM scheme of one provider is horribly crippled.
A unified DRM scheme would no doubt include some form of hardware "Trusted Device" nonsense that would make life needlessly frustrating. Companies have the right to protect their products and services, but we certianly deserve the freedom to walk away and try some other firm's DRM. Hopefully one that is minimally intrusive.
I don't really care if Google is being evil or not; braindead conflicting "standards" and in-fighting among the DRM camp can only be a good thing for us.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Some commenters have said that, althought every Google is working on is labelled as Beta, all of them seem to be very polished and ready.
They must have forgotten that little cache app fiasco, the web browsing accelerator that was so crappy it had to be removed from the public access.
Not because is by Google it has to be good by definition.
--
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"If I buy a video once, do I need to buy it again to watch it on another computer?
No. Once you buy a video, you can download it to other computers up to several times."
I wonder how many "several" is?
None at all.
Seriously. Copy protection is completely unnecessary. While media vendors wait for the Perfect Copy Protection (which will never come), they are leaving money on the table right now.
So, you can wait for the major industry players to settle on a common framework for media copy protection which will work across computers, media centers, PDAs, cell phones, portable game systems, etc. (not bloody likely; they all are jockeying to get single-source lock-in); or you can forego the copy protection "requirement" and start making money now by selling media in common media formats now.
Better get moving; your fickle shareholders aren't going to wait forever for you to get your asses in gear.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Not a fair comparison. iTunesMS runs in iTunes, an application which you download. Google's video store runs inside a browser window. As for wasting resources, iTunes is the one to complain about, with its iPod services running in the background, even if you don't have an iPod.
Google isn't stupid. They've turned beta into a marketing ploy. Every body wants to be "in". Google Betas have traditionally been "in", so Google releases everything as beta to ride the wave.
How many people beat their door down to participate in the Gmail beta? Why not roll the same effect into their other services.
Soylent green is people!!!
However, the paid video stuff is a total embarrassment and arguably the worst thing that Google have ever released in their entire history. It's overpriced, not available outside of North America in many cases [yes, Google blocks some paid content to non-US/Canadian countries!], DRM-restricted (often with "you can only watch for a day" limits too!), requires Windows, can't be viewed offline (online streaming only), is often "old" material and is annoyingly mixed in the "Popular" page with the free ones (are you *seriously* telling me that the most popular paid ones are loaded anywhere near as many times as the most popular free ones?).
Apart from the utterly lousy presentation/DRM/etc. of the Google Video paid material, there's not much of it either (I mean, one episode of CSI so far for $1.99 - one-day pass on Windows only, blocked to European users (!!) and you've got to be online and can't copy it to any other device? How many times can you say "WTF?!"?).
And, of course, we can't go without mentioning BitTorrent/P2P - which is the #1 rival to *any* paid video streaming business. We're seeing downloadable, DRM-free, HD/widescreen, DivX-encoded TV content literally 2 or so hours after the programme finishes. I know which one I'd prefer to see (and if it could be done legally, I'd be willing to subscribe on a per-month basis).
I laughed when I read the part of about "rushed to market". That's a stock phrase that just doesn't apply to Google products. They can't "rush to market" because they pay zero attention to the market. They only have one profitable product (AdSense), but that product is so profitable that nobody has to pay attention to "the market". So they just keep inventing Cool Stuff, and pushing it out. That's why new features keep appearing on Google.com with no advance notice.
Right now, you're saying, "What's wrong with that?" Well, if all you want is hacker toys, nothing. But some us get a little impatient that Google products stay "Beta" for years, and never get their rough edges polished off.
Take Google maps. Yeah, it's a great app. I always try it first for directions. Sometimes I just sit and play with it, it's so cool. But it's how many years now and it's still "Beta". And even though Yahoo Maps is much less fun to work with, I still go back to it sometimes, because Google maps still doesn't memorize addresses for you or plug in Yellow Pages entries.
With Google, "Beta" doesn't mean "This is a preliminary version." It means "Here's as much of the product as we feel like working on. We won't bother with all the boring stuff that makes a mature application, because just thought of some other Really Cool Stuff we'd rather be working on."