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.'"

Official Announcement

[warmgun (669556)]

Here's a link [blogspot.com] to the official announcement from Google's blog.

Too bad

[by 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 (626852)]

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.

NOT Too bad!

[Prysorra (1040518)]

YouTube *purposely* compresses video into a low quality FLV/flash video format before you ever see it. Don't lose all hope - YouTube might get better.

In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if the videos from YouTube made available from the Google Search are higher quality - in fact, maybe even the original . After all, SOMETHING needs to attract visitors to the Google page!

Re:Too bad

[dedazo (737510)]

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.

No, Google Video allowed 4X higher resolution

[ebonkyre (520924)]

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 (844848)]

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.

Re:

[dangitman (862676)]

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.

Re:

[Ark42 (522144)]

Last I checked, Video Downloader was basically spyware for Firefox which logs all videos you want to download by taking you to their website with advertisements to buy other video download products, and the download is proxied through their website, not just ripped directly from the flash file on Google/Youtube's website.

Get Democracy

[khanyisa (595216)]

Or you could Get Democracy [getdemocracy.com] - open source, downloads to your machine, supports YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and more...

Re:

[tknd (979052)]

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 (918799)]

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.

Retain closed captioning

[awtbfb (586638)]

Crud. I hope they retain Google's ability to play and encode closed captioning [google.com].

Re:

[Breakfast Pants (323698)]

Switching from one to the other isn't like switching operating systems. I don't think they really have to have a 'backwards compatibility suite'

I was wondering...

[ubergenius (918325)]

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)?

Re:

[uchihalush (898615)]

Why would content now be sold? That wouldn't work at all. Google Video sells TV Shows. Full Version and uncut. Similar to the iTunes Video Store. This accquisition should in no way affect the price model of youtube. If it does happen, google will have made a huge mistake, one I doubt they will make. I don't see how you jumped from combining of services to selling select videos. Google Video does in fact have videos that you can just watch after all. As far as I can tell only those tv shows/ movies will cont

Re:

[ubergenius (918325)]

You missed my point entirely. Yes, the vast majority of YouTube content would still be free, as is Google Video, but as of now everything, without exception, is free on YouTube, whereas commercial content (TV shows, as you say) are for pay on Google Video. Therefore, my curiosity lies in whether or not those shows will be moving to YouTube (if GV becomes search-only), and if so, how will the paying process be integrated into the previously-completely-free YouTube.

Free vs paid

[sjbe (173966)]

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.

Why would "some YouTube content" being sold make it less alluring? I'm genuinely curious. What (theoretically) prevents you from using it for all the things you use it for now? There's no inherent reason the paid content couldn't just be an addition to the free stuff without detracting from it. Sure they might screw it up but

Re:

[ubergenius (918325)]

You are correct, as long as the integration is well done, there will be no problem. And Google DOES have a good track record of integrating free and for-pay content in the same service. It just will be interesting to see how the transition from "100% free content created entirely by end-users" becomes "a mix of commercial generated for-pay videos combined with free user-generated videos".

Head hurt

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

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 (195998)]

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:

[whitehatlurker (867714)]

Google has re-invented video search [altavista.com].

Predictions

[Duncan3 (10537)]

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 (177657)]

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.

You're confusing things

[brunes69 (86786)]

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.

Re:

[bcrowell (177657)]

Your ideas are interesting, but it sounds like you're proposing techniques that are free-as-in-beer, but not at all free-as-in-speech. If my only way of distributing video is to go through You-Tube's proprietary server-side software, then clearly that's not an OSS approach.

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.
Note that my original post was not "how do I post videos on You Tube u

Re:

[spyder913 (448266)]

Your ideas are interesting, but it sounds like you're proposing techniques that are free-as-in-beer, but not at all free-as-in-speech. If my only way of distributing video is to go through You-Tube's proprietary server-side software, then clearly that's not an OSS approach.

There isn't anything stopping you from hosting them yourself, is there? YouTube is not the only site on the web.

Re:

[Comsn (686413)]

mike melanson, the vlc developer and now linux flash plugin developer, has created a wiki page with what formats youtube supports...

http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=YouTube [multimedia.cx]

also you can create flash video using ffmpeg and mencoder
and play it in vlc and mplayer (both flash1 and flash9/vp6 are supported).

gnash will soon be able to play such videos embedded in youtube....

Re:

[bcrowell (177657)]

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,

Not Really

[rustybrick (698983)]

It is not search only, you will still be able to upload videos to Google Video. The article just says that Google Video will have different features than YouTube... i.e. YouTube will focus more around the community aspects of video.

Finally Google Decides To Focus

[moore.dustin (942289)]

After much being made of Google slipping from doing a few things very well to doing many things up to par, they seem to be focusing again on their existing network. No surprise that it their major investment that is receiving much of the focus.

I for one, am happy to see Google working to improve existing modules instead of rolling out a new beta module from Google Labs every few months.

RIP better interface

[spyrochaete (707033)]

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.

Re:

[sabi (721)]

Wow, two services in one week! The atrocious "beta" Google Groups just became the only interface, despite everyone I know inside and outside of Google hating it...

Re:

[rice_web (604109)]

This assumes that the Google and YouTube teams aren't set to make interface improvements to YouTube.com. That is simply not the case.

Re:

[drinkypoo (153816)]

Sounds to me like you ned VideoDownloader [mozilla.org] which will let you use firefox to download the avi or flv (depending on what formats are permitted.) VLC plays FLVs.

Bad move...

[cei (107343)]

So much for being able to freely host video without that annoying You Tube logo/bug in the corner of your original content.

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

[88NoSoup4U88 (721233)]

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 (325762)]

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 [blogspot.com]

Quality Comparison

[Hiroto. S (631919)]

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 [apple.com]

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 (1220)]

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.

Hope they include downloading

[Paralizer (792155)]

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.

Agreed. Ease of Download FTW

[interactive_civilian (205158)]

The ability to easily download from Google Video is my favorite aspect. I really hope they keep that functionality somehow. It is especially nice that (for most videos), you can easily download for iPod. I am a big fan of Red vs Blue [roosterteeth.com], and since I only have internet access at work at the moment, I usually hit up Google Video for new episodes so that I don't have to download and then convert them to watch at home on my iPod.

There are a lot of other videos that I do this with as well. If I find an interesting

That is to bad

[G00F (241765)]

And here I was going to start uploading video's I created to google . . .

Google-fu

[goarilla (908067)]

since google is the biggest web index in the world
wouldn't SEARCHTERM ext:(avi | wmv | asf | mov | ogg | ogm | mp4 ) already
give you the most video results on this big blue rock in the sky
while searching for things like that is kinda unusual for many users
google video could be a front-end for just that

anyway i like this initiative, because it do think it won't be the easy front-end i just subscribed
and i endorse it since youtube does a better job at providing web based video than video.google imo
their flas

I like Google Video Interface but ...

[bismark.a (882874)]

It misses out on some important features. 1. Favourites. Why on earth did they not add this to Google Video? Of course people can book mark favourites on their browser, but not everybody carries Google Firefox Extension to synchronize bookmarks everywhere. And this could have given clearer picture about popularity of video contents too. 2. Hide Stuff, instead of view fullscreen. People do like to keep their desktops uncluttered. A button of keyboard shortcut or anything suitable to hide away the narrow ri

Here's what you're seeing...

[Eggplant62 (120514)]

Free market forces closing off a method of free publication made simple, easy enough that fools can and do use it. It's something they have not found a way to make a reliable buck from, as the site would lose it's popularity if it went to pay-per-use. They want to commercialize the site and prohibit people from freely posting whatever they wish free of charge. It's also their right, though, as it's their site. How long did you expect them to continue to add storage to archive all that video and keep it alwa

Re:Makes sense

[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

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.

Re:

[caluml (551744)]

I'm only 24.83 years old!!!

Are you? I'd always read you as being 40ish from your posts.

A sort of grumpy, gruff, bearded, cynical UNIX admin, who doesn't like this young upstart Linux.
 
Tell me I'm right!

Re:

[tomstdenis (446163)]

I agree there are funny/informative/etc videos. They're just the vast minority and wading through the shite is not "fun". Rather play the piano, bitch about things on /. or go for a drive instead of sit at the puter waiting for videos to download ...

Tom

Re:

[drinkypoo (153816)]

If you use the videodownloader [mozilla.org] extension to firefox you can download the flash videos. They can be played with VLC. You can use downThemAll! to do the downloads, so they can be managed better than with firefox's crap-ass download window.