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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."
Exactly.... I'm sure improvements to the interface will be coming as they get more of this kind of feedback. As for the paucity of content, remember that anyone can sell a video on video.google.com (with google taking 30%? of the fee). Thus, it is in their best interest to launch the store as early as possible, to entice more copyright owners to sell their videos through their service. This is in stark contrast (I assume) to the model taken by, i.e., iTunes, where content is solicited from a few large corporations.
And the longer Google keep screwing up their plans for a digital media monopoly, the better!
It seems like Google's Video Store would possibly work for independent media, but it's so chaotic for mainstream media. I look at it and I cringe. It looks like those shady online stores that you are cautious about buying from, because of their look. I don't think the Windows only part is rushed necessarily. Google has always been a Windows only company. There are, of course, a few exceptions, but even their web applications are much better supported by Internet Explorer than Safari. Take GMail for instance. It doesn't surprise me that they require a Windows program to play the video.
Well Google is Evil in that they abuse the use of Beta, for instance gmail should not still be in beta, basically google keeps things in beta to keep themselves from having embrassments
"Oh we lost 2,000 of your personal emails sorry, but it's in beta"
"What? You've purchase 200 dollars of Google Videos but now you can't access them? Well it's in Beta."
"Google News says America invaded France? It's in Beta"
"What our stock just crashed? Well it's a beta stock."
Signatures are so 90s
Can't you use this trick to download the video completely?
It seems like the trend in broadband video access is towards small fees for ownership. Apple charges a few bucks for a TV show or music video, google's doing the same thing with media partners, News Corp. is doing the same thing. It seems like they're all trying to take the ITMS model and use it for video. The thing that's different here is that there's widespread usage of legal free video already. Before iTunes sold music videos you could watch them, full length, for free. A lot of web sites let you watch music videos for free. Digital cable (I've used RCN and Comcast) offers video on demand for free. My question is how are these services going to affect the existing offerings? If HBO sells their shows on DVD and as downloads why would they offer free video on demand? Another problem I see with paying for video is that DVR is becoming wide spread. If you have Lost auto-recorded each week why would you need to pay for it in a few days? I'm sure there are people who'll pay for this, look at how many people pay money for ring tones, but I have doubts that video will be as popular as ITMS has proved to be with audio.
I disagree with this article. I find Google Video to be wildly entertaining. They provide endless amounts of entertainment without charge. Yeah it would be nice if the people who hold the video would give us complete access to it, but Google Video just provides a way to share. I've never bought anything from the site and I think the prices are high. But, Google just provides the way to share, and the market should work the prices out. I also like that when you visit the site, you don't feel like they are pressuring you to buy something.
Granted iTunes is an application, but when you're just browsing the music store, most of what it does is rendering that any browser could do. Considering the AJAX services Google has created like GMail and auto-completion in search, I have no doubt they could significantly improve Google Video if they wanted to.
As to resources, iTunes seems to be more of a resource hog than Safari, but less than Firefox on the Mac, so I don't see anything to complain about there.