Google Launches Pay-Per-View Web Video

Elliot Shepherd writes "According to John Batelle, on Monday Google is launching in-browser video playback based on VLC. Google has been accepting video uploads in April, including allowing the video owner to specify that payment is required, through the Google Payment Program." Update: 06/27 22:21 GMT by T : An anonymous reader writes "Google Video is now up. The about page describes what kinds of content has been uploaded to their servers so far -- mostly a random assortment of stuff from Gamespot's archives, a few things from Greenpeace, a Google recruiting video, some breakdancing videos, and other randomness. The in-browser video plugin works seamlessly (although Windows only for now). Looks like it has potential." Check the top entry on Google Blog for a few more words on it, too.

Codec compatibility

[dannyitc]

With VLC's ability to play pretty much any codec under the sun (including microsoft and realmedia's proprietary formats), maybe we'll begin to see more out-of-box compatibility with competing video players. I bet a lot of end-users are tired of codec searching any time they want to watch a certain video.

Re:Mirror

[A beautiful mind]

This seems to be a bot, judging by the posting history.

Good thing. At least now i don't have to wait for someone linkify things in case of slashdotting. Couldn't we get this thing included into 'Related links'?

Re:Is google trying to be all things to all people

[selderrr]

they just happen to have this insane amount of cash. I much prefer their way of spending the cash to the microsoft way : buying patents & sueing people.

The filosophy of all the semeingly nutty google projects is pretty simple : start 10 projects in the hope that one of them becomes wildly successfull. The other 9 are just duds

Misleading Title

[irokie]

The title of this story is completely misleading. Google aren't releasing a pay-per-view thing. In fact, TFA said that those videos which were tagged free were the ones that would be available at first...

"Plenty of folks uploaded video to Google with a payment option, and that has yet to roll out"

To pay or not to pay...?

[mister_llah]

This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?

Movie "rentals" aren't out of the question, to be sure... ... but if the service is akin to, say, a subscription to CNN.com or something... I am not sure how well it would do (heck, any pay-for-video service on the web, I just am not sure on how it would do) ...

===

Admitedly, I've tried one (albeit for free, as the network was in beta) ... http://www.ruckusnetwork.com/ [ruckusnetwork.com]

Essentially its needs its own web browser, so I guess technically Google's got a leg up (and their video format is different, Ruckus uses WMV) ... but in the end, would I pay for them?

Probably not.

Someone might, I suppose, but how many need to before it becomes profitable?

Re:Is google trying to be all things to all people

[D-Cypell]

Im not sure that this particular project is outside of Google's remit. Essentially they are an information storage and retrieval company and this new tech seems to fit that pattern.

GBrowser probably doesnt (didnt) but this is a company that encourages staff to explore their own avenues so there is bound to be some diversity.

Re:To pay or not to pay...?

[Ensign Zatrole]

This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?

I would. There are a lot of TV shows that'll never make it to the country where I live, and if they do, it'll take me several years. Now, I do download this stuff off bittorrent already, but I might be persuaded to pay a reasonable fee to download it legally, if the people producing the TV shows would allow it. Also, I don't have a TV, because the socialist country I live in requires me to pay a license fee to even own a television, even if I never watch the crappy government-owned free-to-air channels.

Re:Codec compatibility

[interiot]

Kind of reminds me of the time when your main source of porn was BBS's, and every once in a while, a really intriguing filename would be sufficient motivation to go off and find a viewer for that image format.

And then along came webbrowsers, and suddenly every image produced was either JPEG or GIF. And it was good.

Re:To pay or not to pay...?

[grahamm]

who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?

1) People who cannot receive the station which airs the show and where the show will either never been shown by stations they can receive or there will be a long delay before the show is shown. This applies especially to shows from stations in countries other than that where the would be viewer lives. 2) When you miss the show and there is not an imminent repeat.

Re:google = content brokers

[Jugalator]

Anyways, if this is what they're about, the consistency behind all their new forays, then maybe Microsoft's already lost the battle to Google, but they're stuck on what no longer matters as much, which is people's relationship to the computer.

Yes, Google is gaining a lot of momentum, and simply because of their good reputation, simple marketing tactics from a certain large company [google.com] doesn't seem to work alone to beat them; the redesigned MSN Search seem to have hardly even put a dent in the natural association people have come to make between web searching and Google, and in hindsight must've been a more or less total failure and waste of time for Microsoft.

Then Microsoft made another attempt [searchenginewatch.com] but it remains to be seen if this service, still in vapor form, will be able to compete with Google Maps. Yes, it seems to look good, but what about its speed and feature set? World coverage in high resolution? Can't tell from the screenshots. If it's about the same as Google's, I think Microsoft will fail horribly once again. "Googling for maps" is quickly becoming as natural as "googling the web".

From TFA

[rbarreira]

The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

Of course they do, VLC is a GPL license project...

Re:Codec compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that it's not the codec makers that decide what formats are used in the end.

The content distributors will use what people have access to. So far that's been Real, WM, and Quicktime. And if they had to choose one, they cut out a large batch of users that didn't have the right player.

Now, when everyone finally has easy access to a universal player like VLC thanks to Google (no, it wasn't exactly popular before), why would the content distributors try to use some obscure new codec and LOSE viewers?

This is a win/win situation for everyone involved EXCEPT the makers of proprietary video players (which is a good thing).

Of course there is still the issue of DRM, but if Google comes up with a better solution to PPV, then that can be another win for us.

Re:To pay or not to pay...?

[BioCS.Nerd]

This would depend fully on the content, I think... who would pay to see TV shows and such when they could use a TV?

I would. I don't own a TV, nor do I feel like paying for cable or satellite to watch the few shows I'm interested in. An iTMS-like service offering TV shows would go over quite well. I'm actually surprised Apple hasn't released one already. I'd be even more suprised if they aren't working on one now (IMHO it'd be the legal crap holding them back as the technology is already there).

Re:google = content brokers

[youknowmewell]

As soon as I can have:

• A Full-fledged Word Processor/Spreadsheet
• Full-fledged Image manipulators (vector, raster, 3D)
• An IM client
• Lots of games
• IDE for any [or all] languages
• Various other niche-market software

I'll still care about what OS I have, and my OS will not be obsolete or fade into obscurity.

Oh, and don't forget about those people out there that would rather not rely on one source for all of their content/tools (even if for now the source is not evil).

Re:Few details

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

I've got a funny feeling the GP wasn't meant to be a direct transcription from his conversation ;-) I cannot believe you actually thought the entire thing was a verbatum replay of the conversation! Its pretty clear he is trying to convey that at least of the time they spoke to him they really had no answers to the most basic questions reguarding the service.

If this conversation really happend or not I don't know, but having three words you don't think are a direct quote from Google when its pretty clear the whole thing isn't a direct quote as a reason to question the sentiment behind post seems illogical. Of course they didn't say exactly that. I'd highly doubt they said EXACTLY anything attributed to them above, but I wouldn't be at all suprised if the basic concepts are pretty accurate.

Re:But what about the patents problem?

[bogie]

"But with Google in the bandwagon, I guess this problem can be solved with a win on the open source front :-)"

Or realistically google will just create a special version of VLC in which they license the proprietary codecs and OSS and VLC gain nothing. That or they will transcode everything into an OSS and patent friendly format that VLC can play without running into any patent issues.

Either way there are no guarantees that this will help OSS in any way or help VLC with its patent issues. Sorry to be negative but its completely naive to think that google will somehow magically fix the patent issues surrounding VLC. That's just wishful thinking.

Re:google = content brokers

[milimetric]

Hate to harp on this:

Can google be your highly optimized data warehousing solution? Can it provide customized applications for the countless stores and factories and businesses of the world? Can it offer a flexible data interchange solution? I didn't think so. Whereas they may very well have the recreational user market cornered, almost all of those recreational users pay for their internet connection. They pay using money they make at their jobs. They make money at their jobs most likely using a computer. Those computers run all the stuff I mentioned above. Operating systems as we know them will never die because of exceptionally good content brokers like Yahoo and Google. Operating systems as we know them will die when the network is so fast that applications are easier (and more cheaply) stored on a server and accessed from terminals.

Whenever you come up with a theory about america in general, you have to put $ first. And nobody does that better than M$. I'm betting on them, no matter what amazing beautiful things google comes up with and no matter how shotty of a job M$ does of running their business. In the car industry there was a Toyota to kill GM. In the OS industry... I don't see anything yet.

Re:Codec compatibility

[Politburo]

Any specifics? I've used the K-Lite pack many times without problems. Sometimes it doesn't always have all the codecs I need, but it has never "hose[d] lots of things" and includes the great Media Player Classic.

Re:Codec compatibility

[Saeger]

Eh? I've installed it quite a few times, and nobody I know's had any problems. As long as you don't do a "custom" install, with its potential for codec conflicts, you'll be fine.