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Google Video Becomes Search-Only, YouTube Holds Content
Bangor writes "Google is planning to turn Google Video into a search index of all the world's available video online. The
change will see YouTube becoming Google's only platform for user-generated video and premium content sales, and Google said that YouTube content would be immediately added to the
Google Video search index. The company plans to expand that to eventually include all video online. From the article: 'The company said that they 'envision most user-generated and
premium video content being hosted on YouTube,' which clearly suggests that the Google Video storefront will eventually give way to YouTube.'"
Google's interface was better. The videos could easily take up nearly full screen, the quality seemed a little bit higher, and it was just overall easier to deal with compared to YouTube.
I was wondering how the acquisition of YouTube would affect their Google Video service, which was always far behind its competition. However, this also means that some YouTube content will now be sold, which detracts from one of the allures it has always had, which was that all content was free and accessible.
I wonder if Google has plans to Google-fy the YouTube look (they'll likely hold onto the brand name, but the look and feel are very changeable)?
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Eh. It's not about the space, it's about good old fashioned "normalization"...Don't duplicate effort. They'd have to have staff to maintain Google video, and staff to maintain YouTube, staff to program new features for Google video, and staff to program new features for YouTube.
The only problem I see is that, historically, YouTube has been much quicker to respond to DMCA-style takedown notices than Google Video, and I'd hate to see that policy continue at YouTube and lose Google video at the same time.
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Too bad. Google Video's interface is far better than YouTube's. The dealbreaker that keeps me loyal to Google Video (not that there's anything worth watching on either) is the ability to skip forward in the video to a part that hasn't yet been cached. I sometimes like to skip through a video to see whether it's worth my while to watch and it makes me nuts having to wait for the whole thing to download first.
So much for being able to freely host video without that annoying You Tube logo/bug in the corner of your original content.
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What has not been achieved by FOSS in the world of video will be in due course.
It is already possible for us Linux geeks, after putting up with large amounts of sweat and frustration, to exchange video freely with each other. The problem is that it's not practical for 99% of all users. Given that 99% of all users now expect their experience to be as effortless as you-tube, I don't see how there's ever going to be any way to communicate video to them in a way that they consider practical. With you-tube, they probably don't even have to have downloaded a plugin, because their copy of IE probably already had the flash player preinstalled for them when they bought the computer.
Video presents no special barriers.
I think there's a window of opportunity that may have been missed with video. With audio, vorbis was already available and stable around the time that a large number of people started having broadband access. With video, it looks like a de facto standard has emerged, and it's proprietary and patented, and it may be too late for theora to compete.
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The nice thing about google video was that it worked and it was simple. You could resize the video arbitrarily. Unfortunately simplicity and functionality doesn't make money.
I liked the Google video feature of downloading videos. Hopefully they will incorporate this in their integration of the two.
For some reason on Linux, with 32bit Firefox and flash, the video/audio desyncs when watching videos on YouTube. So I normally try to find the video in question on Google so I can download and watch it with mplayer. Why YouTube didn't offer a download option, I'll probably never know, but Google seems to know exactly what users want and gives it to them; I can only hope they will continue with that for this project.
On another note, it made more sense for the videos to take up most of the screen. Rather than YouTube's backwards approach of a video taking up 15% of the page, ads taking up 10%, and flamebait/troll comments from 12 year old kids. I only want to see the video (and maybe some ads so they can generate some money for the bandwidth its costing them), that's all we need.
Plus, Google lets you download the original file (DivX/MPEG/whatever). I really hope they don't get rid of this. Google Video was a better video uploading site, it's just that YouTube is more popular and has more content.
It does? When I used the "download" option on Google, it just downloaded a link to the video, which would only play in Google's own video player. Useless.
... and then they built the supercollider.