Does this mean the death of media as we know it today? Well, just keep your pants on for a minute! Seems like there is more to this than meets the eye. I really think it is exciting to see what Google plans to do with these videos. Some folks were scared off by the legal stuff Google had posted when this idea first surfaced for them a few months ago. How have things changed?
John Battelle over at the Search Blog has done a good write up about what to expect today:
I’ve confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google’s video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.
Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as “free” available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.
The video will be searchable via the meta data provided by the submission process (no, there’s no PageRank for video, yet).
Now, before we start discussing how this represents the Death of Comcast/The Networks/Windows Media Player et al, this is not quite that, but it is the start of something big. For one, it’s clear this will be integrated with the Google payment program which was revealed to be in process last week. Plenty of folks uploaded video to Google with a payment option, and that has yet to roll out, but you can expect that it will.
[Read the Rest of the Article!]
No page rank yet? Damn, that means nothing for SEO folks to wet themselves over worrying about right now. Maybe in a few weeks though, right guys? People know how much legalities scare the crap out of me, so I just won’t worry about those aspects just yet. Looks like yet another good innovation from the folks at Google to look forward to!
Go! Google Go!
