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.'"

Comments

Official Announcement

[warmgun]

Here's a link to the official announcement from Google's blog.

Too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Too bad

[painQuin]

But maybe, just maybe, Google will take that into consideration, and use the Google Video backend to power the YouTube website? YouTube is basically a name and color scheme, as far as most people are concerned.

Re:Too bad

[dedazo]

The quality on YouTube varies wildly because of the sheer number of videos on there. Some are pretty good and some are really bad. Google Video on the other hand has far less content (and far less interesting content, AFAIC) and maybe on average the people who upload to it tend to have higher-quality original material.

I rarely care about the quality on YouTube. After all, if I'm looking at an 80s commercial I haven't seen in 20+ years I don't expect HD quality. The obscure cool stuff is why I find YouTube compelling, not the "lonelygirl15"-like crap. YouTube is to video what Napster was to music in the early 00s. It's the most amazing collection of obscure crap you thought you had forgotten or really never thought you'd find. I really like it.

Re:Too bad

[tknd]

I actually prefer youtube's interface to google's. With google's they took the 'search' engine approach to video, but how are you going to 'search' for video with text? I often find that you can't and that's why youtube's browsing capabilities won out over google.

Re:Too bad

[alphamugwump]

What I liked about google video was the fact that the stream was seekable. You could drag the little slider past the end of the buffer, the video would start buffering from that point, and it still play. That doesn't work with youtube.

Head hurt

[Quiet_Desperation]

Can someone please translate this all into non-marketdroid-speak?

3PO?! Get over here! Translate this. Then hit me in the head with a lead pipe so I can understand it.

Re:Head hurt

[bwalling]

Can someone please translate this all into non-marketdroid-speak?

You will now be able to find porn clips on Google Video as easily as you can find porn images on Google Images.

Re:Makes sense

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Predictions

[Duncan3]

1. This will save everyone from having to upload their boobie and accident videos twice - go look at the top 100 some time, that's all it is.

2. People that create the content (videos) still won't get paid, much like Google News, etc.

3. Google will replace their search in a year to one big button "I'm feeling lucky"... which will show a boobie video.

open source and video

[bcrowell]

I'm wondering if OSS is going to be left behind completely when it comes to video. I'm interested in doing some free educational videos, for instance, but I don't want to mess around with proprietary software, because OSS is what floats my boat. If I'm understanding the current technological system correctly, you-tube became popular because they packaged video in a convenient way, as flash applications. However, flash uses proprietary codecs for both audio (MP3) and video. It is possible to develop for flash using a 100% pure OSS setup, but AFAICT there are some pretty severe limitations, including lack of source-code compatibility for GUI widget libraries, and lack of OSS support for proprietary codecs. It doesn't seem like ogg theora is really ready for prime time yet, and in any case there's no sign that Adobe will ever support free codecs for audio and video. Yes, you can use ffmpeg, but the fact that it's illegal in most jurisdictions for many uses is surely going to put a damper on it in the OSS community.

One interesting recent development with audio is that it's become practical to get audio out to users using a completely OSS chain of software. In this WP article, for instance, there are links to recorded snippets (claimed as free use) which take you to a pure-java ogg player that runs as an applet in your browser. The preformance is actually surprisingly decent, possibly because of JIT. Since the last remaining bits of Sun's Java implementation will go GPL in March, we'll really have a pretty good framework for distributing audio via 100% OSS. OTOH, I don't see any signs that anyone is going to take theora seriously any time in the near future.

RIP better interface

[spyrochaete]

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.

Aw. I really like Google vid's clean interface.

[88NoSoup4U88]

I really liked Google vids clean layout, and served perfectly for putting up my (private/nonsearchable) testing videos for a game I am working on.

A shame I have to resort to the cluttered YouTube interface, I hope they at least keep the 'private' option available.

Don't get me wrong: I love YouTube when I want to randomly browse videos one after the other, getting appropriate links from the suggested videos: I just don't think it serves me well in publishing such a video (without resorting to implementing it in my site) with a clean interface.

RTFA! Google Video Will Still Host Content!

[pctainto]

Google Video is not going away! All they're doing is adding YouTube results to the search results when you search Google Video. Their plan is to at some point incorporate other video websites so that Google Video is not just a place to view videos, but also the one place to search for videos.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/look-ahead- at-google-video-and-youtube.html

You're confusing things

[brunes69]

You're mixing up several issues here.

Firstly, posting a video on YouTube does not require any flash development at all. So the availability of FOSS flash development tools for POSTING is a non-starter.

Secondly, YouTube supports a plethora of codecs, some of which are already FOSS. For example, I know they support XVid for a fact. Now, I know this is an MPEG4 based codec and is therefore patent-encumbered in some parts of the world, but IMO this has nothing to do with if it is FOSS or not. YouTube may already support FOSS codecs like Theora, Dirac and Tarkin, I don't know I have never tried. But frankly, it would not surprise me if they did, especially since they already support obscure formats like "Sega Video".

The only FOSS-related issue, as far as YouTube goes, is the fact that you (supposedly) need a binary flash PLAYER to VIEW the content. I say "supposedly" because in actual fact, anyone can download the .flv file and use FOSS tools to transcode it to any format you want, including simply changing the container losslessly. Since these tools are already available, it would not be out of reach to envision a simple FOSS Firefox plugin that did this on the fly for YouTube and other similar sites.

Quality Comparison

[Hiroto. S]

I like some of the feature of Youtube but I couldn't get the video quality I wanted from my iMovie created videos. Here is the report of my experiment I posted to Apple discussion forum (which sadly, nobody responded :-( )

Export option for highest quality posting to Google video and YouTube

They better do the switching after Youtube's quality is equivalent to GV. Also download feature is important for me too.

We'll miss you, google video

[heroine]

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.

No, Google Video allowed 4X higher resolution

[ebonkyre]

GV allowed 640x480 with no size/length restrictions and no fee.
YT maxes out at 320x240, with a 100MB/10min limit on free accounts.

Re:No, Google Video allowed 4X higher resolution

[assassinator42]

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.