Google Video To Launch Actual Video Today
NOTE: The new features are now live. More details here, Google Video With Video Viewer Now Live and More Q&A With Google Video Manager.
John Battelle reports that Google Video today will begin offering user
contributed videos that have been uploaded since April (see Google Wants Your Video). In addition, users
will be able to view the actual video within search results. At the moment, the service only displays content gathered mostly from television resources and only still clips
are displayed, not video.
John doesn’t specifically say whether it was Google itself that confirmed the news to him or rather a third party contact. Google is neither directly quoted or cited in his
report.
Dirson left a comment on John’s blog pointing at a Dutch blog that appears to have
spotted an accidental post from the official
Google Blog about the new features (and here, with Dirson
comment and reprint here).
Since Google itself has leaked some of the news, we can also confirm we’ve been briefed about the new features that are planned to be formally announced today.
Chris Sherman will be bringing further details in SearchDay when Google lifts the
embargo for those who have been prebriefed or gives us the go ahead directly to publish more.
Google isn’t the only service to show user contributed video, of course. Our past article, Yahoo Launches
Video Search Prototype, New Media RSS Format, covers Yahoo Video. It gathers content from crawling the web (unlike Google
Video) and has an RSS feeding mechanism.
SingingFish from AOL has long accepted contributions and feed content, as well. Blinkx is another service that gathers by
crawling and contributions. See Gary’s past post, A Look At Other Video Search Tools, for more about these.
The key difference in what Google Video will offer compared to other services is inline playback. Rather than having to depend on having a particular plug-in for a
particular video format — which your browser will often annoyingly opens in a separate window — Google Video will provide its own lightweight plug-in to display video right
within the results.
Want to discuss? Join our forum thread, Google Video To Gain Live Playback.