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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."
What part of beta do these people not get?
It's not just the fact that it doesn't look pretty.
1- When you buy the video, you are told "requires Windows XP and an Internet connection". You only find out AFTER buying it which format it comes in.
2- When you buy the video, you buy the right to stream it only. If you try to download the video, it will only download a small file and STILL stream the actual video from Google, so you cannot view it offline.
3- Because of the special DRM, there is no way to put paid Google videos on iPod or other mobile devices.
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
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.
I think Google needs to bundle all of their services together (Maps, Video, Print, etc.) into one packeage where you can go for everything. The new service: Google Master.
Of course, initially it would have to be Google Master Beta...
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
A single, unified, fixed government standard for DRM is the way to go. Write your Congressman today! It would be awesome -- no more fussing around with every DRM d'jour. Maybe even a new acronym -- CORE -- Crack Once, Read Everything!!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
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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Most online music stores, including iTunes, post any album sold by CD Baby, unless the artist opts out of digital sales. CD Baby will sell anyone's music -- all you have to do to get on iTunes/Napster, etc., is to send 5 CDRs of your album to CD Baby, and wait for the music stores to update their databases.
If it allows you to purchase videos that won't work on your system without ever warning you of that prior to purchase, it is indeed bad, not "simple".
Imagine if when you bought a DVD from Amazon they would just pick-to-ship by title, mixing discs of all different region codes together. When you got your new DVD, popped it in your player, and discovered that you had bought a Region 3 DVD that was unplayable on your Region 1 player, would you thank Amazon for "simplifying" the process? Or would you be upset?
My bet is you'd be upset -- especially when Amazon could obviate the problem altogether by simply matching your address (or what local store you buy from) to the appropriate region - which they do.
"Simple" makes doing the right thing easy. "Bad" makes doing the wrong thing easy. Google Video's UI is bad.
Read my blog.
I respectfully disagree with the topic post. It was a perfect success for me.
I went to video.google.com, typed in Paris Hilton, and 5 seconds later I was watching a video of her in a skin-tight suit washing herself down with soapy water.
What's not to like about that?
I was reading an NBA related blog where someone was speaking about their experience purchasing NBA game videos from Google Video. Apparently, many of the videos are cut off prior to the end of the game, in the 3rd quarter frequently, with NO 4th quarter coverage. This seems to defeat one of the purposes of offering NBA game videos: so the consumer can watch the game and find out who wins. The purchaser contacted Google Video, who told him "sorry, all sales are final." They definitely have a lot of kinks to iron out, one of them being ripping off consumers buying NBA game videos. See here for the blog post I'm speaking about.
"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
I knew one day I would see someone using the words 'iTunes' and 'fast' in the same sentence without the words 'is not' in there somewhere - I just didn't think it would be so soon.
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).