aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Google Video plays catches up

I was so excited when Google Video started accepting video clips from the public; then disappointed in the offering and swept away by YouTube.

I wasn’t alone.

My assessment of how Google Video missed the boat is that they aimed their product at the video professional and had in a mind a revenue model. YouTube was for you and me and we’ll learn one day what the revenue story is.

From the Google Video Team:

We’ve been working hard to make Google Video the best way to find and play video on the web, and we hope some of our recent features are useful to you:

- Instant gratification: A web-based video uploader (http://video.google.com/videouploadform) for immediate upload and playback
- Share your video with the world, or maybe just your friends: Single-click video posting to popular blog services, including MySpace and Blogger
- Get involved!: Now add ratings, tags, and comments for all videos
- Zeit-what? Now you can see a “Top 100” list (http://video.google.com/videoranking), updated daily, that shows what people are watching
- It’s “Football”, not “Soccer”: Google Video now exists in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, Poland, and the Netherlands

And there’s a lot more to come—you may have noticed that we’re also been experimenting with making “for sale” content free by sponsoring videos with ads. By doing this we’ve been able to expose a lot of great video to our users, like content from Charlie Rose (http://video.google.com/freetoday.html).

As to my own promised video blogging, I’ve got lots of footage but no time (or inclination really) to edit. I guess I’m just not a video blogger at heart.