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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.
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.
Can't you use this trick to download the video completely?