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]

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

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 [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.

Re:I was wondering...

[uchihalush]

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 continue to be sold, while any of ther other crap on youtube/ google video will remain free.

Not Really

[rustybrick]

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.

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 [blogspot.com]

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.

Google Video is much better!

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer youtube to be a part of Google Video not the opposite.

1 - With Google Video I can download the videos in avi format and with a higher resolution.
2 - Google Video license conditions are much better than youtube.
3 - Google Video's interface is better

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.

Google-fu

[goarilla]

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 flash player just kicks video.google's player 'mivonks': i never seem to be able to seek in video.google and it doesn't seem to ... keep downloading data when the player is paused

the former is a necessary feature since recently my cpu cooler is seems to be dying so i have to pause regularly to lower the temps from time to time
and the fact that it keeps downloading enables people with slow or irregular downloads to enjoy a movie as well.
this could simply be the best of both worlds and that would be awesome

Re:RIP better interface

[drinkypoo]

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.

I like Google Video Interface but ...

[bismark.a]

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 right margin, instead of popping up a full screen would have been much more desirable. 3. Comments and labels were added very late. 4. No features to allow user to view history (Not even a frickin link to the GOogle Search history page), or organize use of Google Video content and features were provided. You tube has for instance, playlists (manipulatable, Gooogle Video only has automatic search playlist). 5. Search in Google Video was terrible. Most of the time I get totally unrelated video. Whereas, more often than not, viewing one item on YouTube, would almost in 80% of the cases, get you handy links to related content. You could be hooked on the site for almost entire browsing session. 6. Communities were better provided for in You Tube. Google Video does not have any community feel in Google Video. Although the minimalistic interface worked fine for Google Search Site, it does not work for Video content sites. The main reason is, one would spend about few minutes searching for stuff, but substantially much more viewing (or reading) content which they have searched. And that is something which needs more usable features.

Retain closed captioning

[awtbfb]

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

Re:No, Google Video allowed 4X higher resolution

[OfficeSubmarine]

It depends on the operating system reported by the browser. Not sure about osx, but windows gets the download link, and linux receives an avi file. LInux wins on that because google didn't feel like putting the resources into making a linux compatible player.