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.'"

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.

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.

Re:I was wondering...

[ubergenius]

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.

NOT Too bad!

[Prysorra]

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]

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:Free vs paid

[ubergenius]

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".

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 [apple.com]

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

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.