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Google Video Not Ready for Prime Time? 225

Posted by Zonk from the not-quite-past-two-o's-in-goog dept.
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."
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Google Video Not Ready for Prime Time? More

Google Video Not Ready for Prime Time?

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  • What's so shocking? Is it because this is Google and Google never makes mistakes? If you think that, then let's talk precision, recall and F-measure on their famous search engine.

    Google is going to pound "new" technology after "new" technology at us, so prepare yourself for some that might not be useful or need polishing. I would blame this on the fact that:

    Engineers can devote 20 percent of their time to projects of their choice.

    From this article [sfgate.com] and I think that would explain why we get so ma

  • ..... Their "Do No Evil" mantra by coming up with such a crappy UI and yet another DRM?
    • may just make it clear to all that DRM isn't going to solve Hollywood's perceived problem, and perhaps they need to look at the "problem" again.
    • I wouldn't be surprised if Google felt pressured into using some sort of DRM by recent developments. If they realeased the videos from their store sans DRM and they go straight to the Internet, the *AA's might sue. When one looks at the current administration and recent court decisions, they might stand a good chance.

  • Google Video Beta (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bewmIES ( 251890 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:15PM (#14466405)
    What part of beta do these people not get?

    • Re:Google Video Beta (Score:5, Interesting)

      by arrrrg ( 902404 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:22PM (#14466473)
      Exactly.... I'm sure improvements to the interface will be coming as they get more of this kind of feedback. As for the paucity of content, remember that anyone can sell a video on video.google.com (with google taking 30%? of the fee). Thus, it is in their best interest to launch the store as early as possible, to entice more copyright owners to sell their videos through their service. This is in stark contrast (I assume) to the model taken by, i.e., iTunes, where content is solicited from a few large corporations.

      • iTunes, et al (Score:5, Informative)

        by soupdevil ( 587476 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:47PM (#14466703)
        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.

    • Re:Google Video Beta (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GweeDo ( 127172 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:22PM (#14466475) Homepage
      Oh dear crap stop this!

      If it is so beta that it just doesn't work then don't release it. So far any "beta" from Google has atleast been polished and worked well. This simply does not. And some of the issues aren't a "is it beta" or not question, like the DRM.

      So please, I love Google to, but drop the "its beta crap". They are a corporation that is taking your/my money. I want quality products. This simply isn't.

      • If it is so beta that it just doesn't work then don't release it.

        Except it does work. And it's labeled as a beta, which is a clear warning sign to anyone who's paying attention that it might have issues. Don't like it? Don't use it. Meanwhile, the people who do like it would like you to shut the fuck up.

        • And it's labeled as a beta...

          Everything is "beta" at Google. It's an inside "joke". Fact is, it's a product, a shitty product, a product that shouldn't have bee released. The whole Google "beta" thing is old already, and it's no excuse except a silly bad one.

          • I just don't get it. If you saw a product on the shelf that says "This product may cause you to have explosive diarrhea" and you ate it and you got the runs so bad that the impulse was sufficient to lift you off the toilet, would you go back to the store and complain?

            Complaining about a product labeled "beta" is the same thing exactly.

            Again, don't like it? Don't use it. Most of us find that many of the beta products (esp. gmail and maps - well, maps isn't beta any more, but I haven't noticed much dif

            • Beta implies that it will go full production very soon, how many YEARS (with an S) has google had newsgroups in beta? And how many years has froogle been in beta, google just slaps on beta to let them do whatever they want to it at the same time giving them an excuse for bad quality.

              Let's be honest here, unless google alone gets to redefine the concept of beta then after 2 months I say it's production and no longer beta.
              • IF you really want to complain, don't do it on the basis of time, that is meaningless in the Web Application world because there's a "release early, release often" strategy. Do it on the basis of new features. New features should only seldom be released during the alpha phase and never during beta.
        • "Meanwhile, the people who do like it would like you to shut the fuck up."

          Yeah, you wouldn't want your criticisms about a beta product to get back to Google or anything.
          • Whining on slashdot is not the most effective way to get google to do anything. In fact, if no one in a position to make your changes reads your comment, it's a totally ineffective way. Go tell google!
      • They are a corporation that is taking your/my money. I want quality products. This simply isn't.

        Google has never taken a penny of mine. Have they taken your money? Perhaps you are an advertiser? In that case, choose not to advertise with Google Video.

      • Re:Google Video Beta (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Irish_Samurai ( 224931 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:54PM (#14466768)
        As I understand it, Google video is actually charging the People who sell the vidoes a fee for handling the transaction.

        Google isn't charging any end users for the service. I didn't have to pay to browse the videos, and neither did anyone else. Your argument that "I want quality products" is completely misplaced, the only people who should be bitching about this being a "beta" are the people whe sell on it.

        You may view it as a technicality, but it's very clear in a business sense. This software IS beta, it's not finished. Google is charging vendors who wish to participate in this beta a fee for handling the transaction. When Google gets adequate feedback, they will alter the software. When the software becomes extremely user friendly, Google will raise the transaction rate and possibly begin charging the end user.

        The product is marketed as a service for selling and finding videos. You mistake the fact that you have to pay for a video with that of having to pay for a googles product.

      • No software is perfect. Hence, "beta" really means "use at your own risk". If you don't like it, wait until they drop the beta.

    • can anyone say "loooooow expectations"? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What part of beta do these people not get?

      Ahh, so you subscribe to Microsoft's definition of "beta", which means that it stays up long enough to do some amount of testing, so lets through it at the customers and let them bang the hell out of it.

      Beta does not mean that it is perfect, but beta is supposed to be that step just before it does ship, which means you would not expect any MAJOR issues. Not being able to tell if something is drm'ed or not until after you "purchase" it to me falls into the cate
    • What part of Google charging money for a service that isn't up to par (apparently) don't you get? Who cares if it has the word beta next to the name?

      Also the main point in the summary (and through much of the article) is the DRM issue, and that's not something likely to change from beta to release (assuming that they do someday move ahead from beta).

      • If you want to pay for something, go ahead. If you don't like it, don't pay for it; duh.

        I don't usually have trouble with SkypeIn (also still in beta), but there are times when a call just cuts out. Heres the trouble: I don't know why; it could be from SkypeIn, someone calling me from a cellphone who's switching towers, or any other link that breaks in the chain.

        I still pay for SkypeIn, because I can get calls while I'm abroad with people having to pay only local rates (which sometimes amounts to free).
        • I can't help thinking that a fair number of consumer laws we have for purchase of goods/services in the real world might indicate that 'caveat emptor' is not considered a valid excuse for any and all defects by society in general.

          This is the first (I think) big thing Google have done where you have to pay for it, so it's not surprising if people are not buying the "it says 'Beta' so it can be as crap as we like" excuse any more.


    • What part of beta do these people not get?


      I don't care if Google wants to be cute and call all their software beta forever, the issue here that doesn't apply to gmail or google news is that they are charging real money for this service. When you are charging money for a service (rather than giving it away for adviews or whatever) you should really have very basic problems like these sorted out first even if you call the software Beta, Alpha or Ernie.

    • Re:Google Video Beta (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0kComputer ( 872064 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:37PM (#14466631)
      Google "Beta" doesn't carry a whole lot of weight with me seeing as how almost all their crap is beta. Case in point - Google news, that thing has been in beta for going on 5 years now.

      • Re:Google Video Beta (Score:3, Insightful)

        by eric0213 ( 904860 )
        Google News will come out of beta once they learn how to turn a profit on it. However, once they start selling ad space on it, their usual method of generating revenue, they're going to run into violations from the sites their scraping news from.

        1. Create a sweet news site
        2. Form a large following
        3. ???
        4. Profit
        5. Come out of beta
        • Why does it have to remain in beta until then? Thinking up ways of making money off something bears no relation to its readyness to be released, and thats when something comes out of beta.

          Google can quite easily bring it out of beta and nothing would change, its as simple as changing the icon. Why dont they?

      • Beta = exclusiveness = demand (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bradleyland ( 798918 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @06:25PM (#14467672)
        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!!!

    • Re:Google Video Beta (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Cracell ( 788266 )
      Well Google is Evil in that they abuse the use of Beta, for instance gmail should not still be in beta, basically google keeps things in beta to keep themselves from having embrassments

      "Oh we lost 2,000 of your personal emails sorry, but it's in beta"

      "What? You've purchase 200 dollars of Google Videos but now you can't access them? Well it's in Beta."

      "Google News says America invaded France? It's in Beta"

      "What our stock just crashed? Well it's a beta stock."
    • Yeah, it's not like Google keeps products in perpetual beta, which leads to people taking the term with a grain of salt when it's applied to Google or anything. . .
    • What part of expecting a quality, working product when you pay do you not get?
    • "Beta" used to actually mean something, like limited pre-production testing. Have you ever been in a real beta program? With an NDA, and a testing coordinator, and weekly status reports? "Beta" now is just Google's (and others') excuse for "let's avoid actual responsibility for as long as possible." It's not supposed to mean, or didn't used to mean, "Hey, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, we don't actually care."
    • The moment you charge money for it, it ceases to be beta.

      This is no beta. This is a rip-off. Google just shot themselves squarely at their own foot with a big gun.

  • Not All Negative... (Score:2, Informative)

    by xocp ( 575023 )
    The article wasn't all negative:
    Google introduced one feature that should help make Google Video more popular with owners of some handheld devices: Non-DRMed videos can be downloaded in iPod- and PSP-friendly formats. Allowing iPod and PSP owners to bypass what can be the sometimes-tedious conversion process is a smart move on Google's part.

  • Interface is ok (Score:2, Insightful)

    by iMaple ( 769378 )
    . 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.

    The interface isnt bad, its just simple (which is good in my books). There are links which let you view only the free/paid content or both. The search works pretty well.You could call the interface minimalitic but what else did you expect from Google ? The

    • Re:Interface is ok (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jalefkowit ( 101585 ) <jason@jaso3.14nlefkowitz.com minus pi> on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:47PM (#14466705) Homepage
      The interface isnt bad, its just simple (which is good in my books).

      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.

    • FWIW, I downloaded the native Windows client, thinking that maybe it would be faster than the flash client that performs badly on my system.

      Nope, it made my system nearly unresponsive until I closed it, and framerates downright SUCKED.
    • Sorry, the interface is bad. It's clunky, inelegant, and wastes bandwidth on images whether you want them or not or even whether they're useful or not.

      Compare Google Video with iTunes (and "Beta" doesn't excuse them, beta is supposed to mean feature complete -- it's really more like Alpha). I can browse iTunes by search, from the main window (w/images), or from the "browse" facility, which gives me a nice, fast, information rich list of genre/subgenre/artist/album.

      The iTunes experience was clearly "designe
      • Not a fair comparison. iTunesMS runs in iTunes, an application which you download. Google's video store runs inside a browser window. As for wasting resources, iTunes is the one to complain about, with its iPod services running in the background, even if you don't have an iPod.
        • Granted iTunes is an application, but when you're just browsing the music store, most of what it does is rendering that any browser could do. Considering the AJAX services Google has created like GMail and auto-completion in search, I have no doubt they could significantly improve Google Video if they wanted to.

          As to resources, iTunes seems to be more of a resource hog than Safari, but less than Firefox on the Mac, so I don't see anything to complain about there.

      • Re:Interface is BARELY ok (Score:4, Funny)

        by Tim Browse ( 9263 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @06:18PM (#14467591)
        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.

  • Not just that (Score:5, Informative)

    by elfguy ( 22889 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:20PM (#14466460) Homepage
    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.

  • look to the horizon (Score:3, Funny)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:20PM (#14466461)
    Look over there at the horizon. I think I see an E. And is that a V slowly coming up behind it?

  • I love Google, but I am tired of this 'it's in BETA' excuse. They have had stuff in beta for years it seems. Look at their news and email services... they are still in beta! So if problems occur, they can just blame it on being in beta?!?!? I think not.

    http://religiousfreaks.com/ [religiousfreaks.com]
  • The Register had a similar piece yesterday [theregister.co.uk] - pretty much the same complaints: "So far, it's just a really crap web site"...
  • I am not sure what the fuss is about...

    The interface is not all THAT clunky, but releasing in BETA for a very long time is generally what they do for just about everything. The Google search itself was considered beta for, what, close to 3 years... GMail is still beta and they have millions of Gmail users.

    Now they big fat wallets - does that mean they will do things differently?

    Not likely. :o)

  • No wonder consumers are rejecting it.

    • No, "consumers" don't know any better. It's customers who are rejecting it.

      Now, what we need to do is convert as many "consumers" into customers as possible before DRM becomes too entrenched.
  • using words like "inflict" and not pointing out that "against the desire of many in congress" also means that there are people in congress in favor tells me the author of this one is pretty biased.

  • Another DRM... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Toasty981 ( 43996 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:29PM (#14466556) Homepage

    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.

  • Rushed Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheOtherAgentM ( 700696 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:31PM (#14466570)
    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.

  • Google Bundle (Score:5, Funny)

    by butterwise ( 862336 ) <butterwise AT gmail> on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:31PM (#14466571)
    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...

  • Ars Technica, please? (Score:2, Informative)

    by dch24 ( 904899 )
    Most of Ars Technica's articles are well written. But this one is missing some key facts.

    From The Article
    Mac and Linux users are still waiting for a version of Google Earth and Google Desktop Search

    Google Earth for Mac is already out.

    I'm wondering if Google rushed this product out the door because of the timing of CES and because everyone expected them to. Google has carefully chosen places where it wants to compete, with the result that its product releases have mostly been a string of successes.

  • Down with Proprietary DRM (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lije Baley ( 88936 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:35PM (#14466611)
    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!!
    • And, of course, it would be closed-source and compulsory for all music and video. All players and recorders of any sort would be required to implement it in hardware.

      And cracking it or possessing cracking tools would be a felony.

  • The Website Looks Fine (Score:3, Informative)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:37PM (#14466625)

    I saw a piece on this the other day, so I checked out the Web site. I'm one of those people who is pretty critical of bad UIs (just ask my co-workers). I don't see any major problems with their Web site UI. It's nothing especially good or bad. I did not have any problem using it. I'm not too keen on the DRM, as it seems to be implemented and it seems a little deceptive if you can't actually download the files for viewing, only stream them. That isn't really buying a video, just subscribing to a service that will stream it for you. It makes it pretty useless for watching shows on your laptop while commuting, or on a drive.

    My opinion is the service is technologically too limited to be useful to me, but the UI is just fine.

  • Not the first (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Life700MB ( 930032 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:39PM (#14466644)

    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.


    --
    Superb hosting [tinyurl.com] 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
  • Getting better all the time as well. The DRM? Eh yeah, that is terrible, ehm because I itching to buy a credit card and pay for content NBA games or other crap stuff.

    No I am talking about the "free" content Google has put online and is even hosting. Oh it probably won't last but for now I can download an awfull lot of japanese music videos for free and without some poor fan having his website raped.

    The only oddity is that opera under linux refuses to load the movie file while firefox does work. Then again

    • Bitching about yet another DRM standard is a bit silly. There is no DRM standard so how can there be another one. All you got is a lot of DRM crap all of wich hopes to become the standard.

      Another DRM 'standard' is a good thing for the consumer. The more different forms of DRM there are the more difficult they are going to be to enforce. If all of the players could agree on one method of implementing DRM they might actually be able to make it work, but as longs as they fight about it they will never get

  • Re: Google Video Not Ready for Prime Time? (Score:4, Funny)

    by brundlefly ( 189430 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:48PM (#14466710)
    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?
  • As if a million Google supporters cried out at once, and then were silent.

    It's Friday the 13th, I think good has taken it's first serious step towards the dark side.

  • Major issues with Google NBA videos (Score:5, Informative)

    by beisbol ( 173766 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:52PM (#14466755)
    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 [truehoop.com] for the blog post I'm speaking about.

  • I love this bit in the download FAQ (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Curmudgeonlyoldbloke ( 850482 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @04:54PM (#14466763)
    "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?
  • It's clear that before the public and any legislators start to notice the problems we already see, the problem has to become much bigger. Could it be that since (a) the media licensors will not license without DRM and (b) they don't want to assist either Microsoft or Apple, making their own DRM is the only solution.

    This is about the only solution if they want to participate in the market without helping anyone else. I'm sure that the UI deficiencies will be resolved eventually.
  • And so Google began its journey to the dark side.

    Give in to your investors...feel the equity flow through them...all things can be financed with the equity...

    Beware those that say they can do no evil. They almost always do the opposite, its just that they don't consider it that personally.

  • Google's open-standards negligence (Score:3, Informative)

    by RomulusNR ( 29439 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @05:01PM (#14466824) Homepage
    This is not the only non-open Google product to date. Pretty much all of Google's portfolio that doesn't come in or out of the main search page is closed-standard. Google Maps is one of the rare recent shining examples of openness, but Maps as a resource in itself was orphaned by Google when it stuffed and devalued it into Google Local.

    In the meantime... Google Earth, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Desktop, Google Deskbar, and now Google DRM Video are notoriously limited to commercial platforms and/or tools. So much for Google being the preferred choice of the O/S world.
  • Apple should license its DRM. They could make a lot of money off of licensing fees, and I don't see how it would negatively impact their sales. I doubt many people buy iPods for ITMS right now, especially since there are alternatives to ITMS which are (almost) as good. Apple should be trying to cement its standard for digital media so that customers won't need to worry about their purchased files becoming obsolete.

  • RFC: A Unified Approach to DRM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @05:10PM (#14466933) Homepage Journal
    I have a proposal for a unified approach to media copy protection. This approach is patent- and royalty-free, only requires technology that is already available, and can be implemented in a very short timeframe for very little engineering cost. The approach has already been tried on a fairly large scale in the computer industry, with tremendous success:

    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

  • 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."

    I don't see the big deal. By the time I'm ready for this I should be able to run each DRM system in its own virtualized partition well away from everything else.

    And I'll keep another partition available for runni

  • For those witty people who've pointed out it's in Beta and therefore should not be judged too harshly .... NEARLY EVERYTHING BY GOOGLE IS IN BETA.

    Google uses the term "Beta" they way regular people use the term "final release, further development will not occur ever".

    I think Google News is the oldest service they offer that is STILL IN BETA - from memory it's 6 years old now.

    If there's any tweaking on one of their (many) Beta services it's most likely going to be the advertisements tweaked to perform a litt
    • I would agree with you, except that many Google analysts and employees themselves, when asked about the long-lasting beta status of Google news, offered one informational nugget:

      Google calls software beta when it has not yet figured out a way to turn a profit out of it. Google News, for example, was created without an obvious profit mechanism in mind. Once it was released into beta, Google couldn't figure out a way to make money off of it since all the content (with the exception of news headlines) is hos

  • It seems like the trend in broadband video access is towards small fees for ownership. Apple charges a few bucks for a TV show or music video, google's doing the same thing with media partners, News Corp. is doing the same thing. It seems like they're all trying to take the ITMS model and use it for video. The thing that's different here is that there's widespread usage of legal free video already. Before iTunes sold music videos you could watch them, full length, for free. A lot of web sites let you w
  • I see no issue with another DRM.... not only does it help to throw a monkeywrench in the ol' database that the government and Hollywood are trying to create, but the user is still able to watch it. I say go for it!
  • Not to repeat myself: http://mark-watson.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

    I am used to seeing Google's beta release systems reasonably polished and almost always useful, so their video store is a real disappointment. But, wait 6 months and it might be awesome.

  • Google Video on PSP (Score:2, Informative)

    by cakestick ( 323966 )
    The instructions given for downloading/transferring videos onto PSP are simple at best, and provide no instruction on where they should be placed. As a little background, there are separate locations for original PSP video as well as the AVC format that is allowed by the 2.0 firmware (Both are MP4 format). It's not specified that these are AVC videos, and as such need the new firmware. Furthermore, they must be renamed in a correct format in order to be played on the PSP.

    -----

    Anyone looking for this informa

  • Free clips are fun, but the paid stuff is "WTF?!" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rklrkl ( 554527 ) on Friday January 13, 2006 @07:28PM (#14468168) Homepage
    I must say that it is fun to keep reloading the "Popular" Google Video page and loading in the interesting-looking free videos. Some of them are very well done, although there's some blatant copyright infringement going on (plenty of TV show clips and music video clips in there!). The fact that their Flash player works cross-platform for video and sound (yes, even on Linux!) is very impressive too.

    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).

  • There's Beta .... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @02:12AM (#14469851) Homepage Journal
    ...and there's totally non-functional.

    I laughed when I read the part of about "rushed to market". That's a stock phrase that just doesn't apply to Google products. They can't "rush to market" because they pay zero attention to the market. They only have one profitable product (AdSense), but that product is so profitable that nobody has to pay attention to "the market". So they just keep inventing Cool Stuff, and pushing it out. That's why new features keep appearing on Google.com with no advance notice.

    Right now, you're saying, "What's wrong with that?" Well, if all you want is hacker toys, nothing. But some us get a little impatient that Google products stay "Beta" for years, and never get their rough edges polished off.

    Take Google maps. Yeah, it's a great app. I always try it first for directions. Sometimes I just sit and play with it, it's so cool. But it's how many years now and it's still "Beta". And even though Yahoo Maps is much less fun to work with, I still go back to it sometimes, because Google maps still doesn't memorize addresses for you or plug in Yellow Pages entries.

    With Google, "Beta" doesn't mean "This is a preliminary version." It means "Here's as much of the product as we feel like working on. We won't bother with all the boring stuff that makes a mature application, because just thought of some other Really Cool Stuff we'd rather be working on."

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