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.

Too bad

[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]

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.

Re:

[otacon]

What would be interesting if they gave you an option...say if you found the video through google's search it played with their player, but if you searched directly on youtube you used theirs...that was no one has to get used to something new if they don't want to...

Re:

[Breakfast Pants]

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'

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.

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.

Re:

[nernie]

You can get the video downloader add-on to firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/ [mozilla.org] to download the videos, then watch them on something like VLC. It won't make the quality better, but I find that the playback is smoother and you can make it true full screen (no browser window).

Re:

[Ark42]

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.

Re:

[nernie]

I'm not sure about the rest, but the little button just pops up a little window with a link that you can right click and save as. No ads are on that page.

Re:

[norminator]

Try DownloadHelper [mozilla.org]. There's a few other extensions like it too. I really like DownloadHelper. I use it with a Windows build of ffmpeg along with a batch file so I can drag and drop .flv files I download from YouTube to convert them to play on my iPod. It's not as simple as if they let you just download it in an iPod format (that's one feature Google Video has that I wish YouTube could pick up soon... I think it would make YouTube's already explosive popularity even bigger), but it works pretty well, and

Get Democracy

[khanyisa]

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

Re:

[drsquare]

Those FLVs it downloads are useless. The sound's usually out of sync, it doesn't play in many players, and you can't skip any of it, you have to watch it all the way through.

Re:No, Google Video allowed 4X higher resolution

[assassinator42]

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]

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:

[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.

Re:

[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.

Re:

[techitout]

Yeah, I agree about the user interface -- YouTube's social functionality is much more developed, and enticing. Google is much more minimalist (as usual). Will they ever bring a design team in?

Re:

[jaymz2k4]

agreed, i hope they do what some posters are suggesting and allow the user the choice to autoplay it within the current googlevid style. personally, i normally search on googlevid first for more 'lecture style' topics than youtube and normally get good results, so it would be a total shame to see it all moved to youtube, imho. then again since they are one & the same company, the interface would (you'd think), take the best of both.

Re:Too bad

[alphamugwump]

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.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[bismark.a]

Wow, if they take away downloads from Google Videos then I will have to really find a flash stream recorder. Any one recommend a good one for Firefox?

Retain closed captioning

[awtbfb]

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

Re:

[drsquare]

Google's interface was better at playing the videos, but it was a nightmare to find them in the first place compared to youtube.

Makes sense

[otacon]

I mean it makes sense considering a lot of videos appear on both, and they own both, so why not cut costs by just linking to the one on youtube. That way they can free up more storage as they keep adding to gmail.

Re:Makes sense

[SatanicPuppy]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

On the technical side, I hope that Google Video's ability to advance to any point in a video will be added to YouTube.

Re:

[otacon]

Yeah I know what you mean, the gmail thing was sort of a joke I know they have almost infinite space anyways, its about cutting costs, because it's more expensive to do the same thing in two different places for no real reason, pretty much just like you said.

I was wondering...

[ubergenius]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 - translated

[fahrbot-bot]

Can someone please translate this all into non-marketdroid-speak?

It means, "All your videos are belong to Google".

Re:Head hurt

[bwalling]

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:

[tehcyder]

You will now be able to find porn clips on Google Video as easily as you can find porn images on Google Images.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but i've never been that impressed with the results of searches on Google Images. For example, with safe search off and looking for large images only, searching on "redhead" gets 743 results. I think it highly unlikely that there are only 743 different pictures of redheads on the entire internet :-)

Re:

[bwalling]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but i've never been that impressed with the results of searches on Google Images. For example, with safe search off and looking for large images only, searching on "redhead" gets 743 results. I think it highly unlikely that there are only 743 different pictures of redheads on the entire internet :-)

Results 1 - 18 of about 20,900 for redhead. (0.17 seconds)

Re:

[whitehatlurker]

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

Predictions

[Duncan3]

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.

Re:

[DittoBox]

Oh...you mean like these? [youtube.com]

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:

[woadlined]

What has not been achieved by FOSS in the world of video will be in due course. Video presents no special barriers.

Re:

[bcrowell]

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,

Re:

[woadlined]

True enough...although there was a time where IE was viewed by practical folks as a de facto standard.

Re:

[OfficeSubmarine]

True, but firefox is a better browser than IE. And even then it's still not even close to being even with IE for usage. While theora, at least according to the video guys I know, is pretty crappy compared to almost everything else out there. If the only thing something has going for it is a license, than yep, I'd say it's already lost.

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.

Re:

[bcrowell]

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]

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:

[bcrowell]

There isn't anything stopping you from hosting them yourself, is there? YouTube is not the only site on the web.
What format do I host them in? If I host them in ogg theora, I won't be able to reach 99% of the population.

Re:

[brunes69]

Write an ActiveX control and a Mozilla plugin that install the Theora codec on their PC with a single click then.

The kind barriers you're describing are not difficult to bypass. The real problem is getting people to use your site en mass - which is never going to happen anyway since YouTube has already cornered the market. So there's really no point to what you're suggesting.

Re:

[Comsn]

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:

[ianalis]

The patent of MP3 is already expired, if I am not mistaken

Re:

[bcrowell]

The patent of MP3 is already expired, if I am not mistaken
You're mistaken. It's going to expire in the 2010's. Here [wikipedia.org] is discussion of some recent legal action taken against patent violations.

Re:

[bedouin]

I've had good results uploading my material to Archive.org's Moving Picture Archive [archive.org]. They even prompt you with a generator while uploading your video to build a Creative Common's license suitable for your project. Of course, it never caught on amongst the general population because they don't allow copyrighted stuff and actually enforce it. As far as simplicity though, you can upload any format you want, in streaming or downloadable form without having it converted a second time to flash.

I did an hour lo

oh noes!

[tomstdenis]

I never used either on any sort of regular basis... something about flash being a bitch for 64-bit Linux users...

I guess it takes "will power" not to be a sheep to fads. That and 99% of the videos on the sites are either of horrible quality [bitrate/audio/etc], horribly produced [shoddy script/camera/plot/point] or both. That and I grew up with "Americas Funniest Videos" so I have all the useful home videos memories I can stand. ... am I just an old fart? Can't be!!! I'm only 24.83 years old!!!

Tom

Re:

[tomstdenis]

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]

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.

Re:

[caluml]

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!

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.

Finally Google Decides To Focus

[moore.dustin]

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]

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]

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]

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:

[archen]

And google lets you download the video as avi in Linux (usually). YouTube doesn't seem to do this last I checked. Does that mean they just locked me out of their video content entirely?

Re:

[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.

Re:

[Nemetroid]

Well, atleast Youtube loaded videos correctly at all. Every time i had to use Google Video it would stop somewhere midway through and you'd have to skip a bit to go on.

Bad move...

[cei]

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

Re:

[itsdave]

I think the watermark is only visible when you embed the video on your own web page. if you watch the video on youtubes site, the watermark is not there.

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.

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]

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.

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

We'll miss you, google video

[heroine]

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.

Re:

[KoldKompress]

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.

Because Google Search doesn't make any profit...?

Hope they include downloading

[Paralizer]

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]

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

Re:

[xehonk]

For some reason on Linux, with 32bit Firefox and flash, the video/audio desyncs when watching videos on YouTube.

Try upgrading to the newest version of flash (9.0.31 or something). No more a/v desync for me :)

That is to bad

[G00F]

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

I'm not surprised

[ErGalvao]

Nothing more logical, if you think about how Google Video compete with You Tube and the power that the You Tube brand has. I don't see how Google would maintain both services running simultaneously as they are today.

Stereo or Mono

[lonechicken]

What about stereo vs. mono? And I don't mean the "stereo" (fake two channel mono) of YouTube videos to date.

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 flas

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 ri

Re:

[bismark.a]

Mucked up the format here

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 hi

Here's what you're seeing...

[Eggplant62]

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

Welcome to yesterday

[Conright]

Yahoo Video already "searches all available video content" including Google video and Youtube and many others. http://video.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]