Itsme
06-27-2005, 09:55 AM
Google Adds Playback to Video Search
By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor
June 27, 2005
Google Video Search now includes video content uploaded by users, and this content can be displayed directly in your browser window.
Google has been collecting video from users since April, but until today that content has not been accessible. Today's launch now allows you to keyword search user-submitted video content, and if you download the new Google Video Viewer you can watch the content directly in Internet Explorer or Firefox on computers running Microsoft Windows.
"We have a lot of content that we've received via the upload program, and we've been overwhelmed with the quality," said Peter Chane, senior product manager for Google Video. The content covers a wide range of subject material, and includes both amateur and professionally produced material.
To find content to view, search for it through the Google Video Search. This is the same interface used to search the television programming that Google has been indexing since December of last year.
The difference is that you can actually play videos uploaded by users, while you can only see stills and transcripts from the television programming. Viewable videos are indicated by a triangular "play" icon at the top of a search result.
To view videos, you first need to download the new Google Video Viewer, a small applet that allows you to click on Google Video search results and view the video directly in your browser. The video viewer is adapted from the open source VideoLan (VLC) player, a small application that plays the mpeg audio and video formats that Google requires for user submitted videos.
Video clips will begin playing from the point where your search terms are found in the audio portion of the video. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well.
To watch some video programming, you'll have to pay a fee. In most cases, this fee was specified by the content owner, not Google, though Google takes a small portion of the fee to defray its costs. The exception is if Google's costs are extraordinary—say for a popular, high resolution video. In that case, Google may arbitrarily charge users a fee if you've specified zero as the price for your video or take a larger revenue share of the price to cover some of these costs.
Google Video search looks at metadata encoded with the video. Chane said many videos were also submitted with transcripts and annotations that are time-coded, allowing playback to begin at the point where your search terms are located in clips.
At this point, there is no categorization, directory-type structure or any other information that lets you know what kind of video content is available—you just have to search and hope for the best. To be fair, the same is true for most other video search services, such as Yahoo Video, though Yahoo does offer an advanced video search that gives you more control over your results.
Chane said that Google plans to continue to add content, and will also make the Google Video Viewer available for other platforms sometime soon.
It will be interesting to see whether the Google Video Viewer is adopted in a widespread fashion. If so, it could establish a new standard platform for playing video on the web—content providers could offer video that would play directly in a browser window, and that content could be hosted anywhere, not just on Google's servers.
By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor
June 27, 2005
Google Video Search now includes video content uploaded by users, and this content can be displayed directly in your browser window.
Google has been collecting video from users since April, but until today that content has not been accessible. Today's launch now allows you to keyword search user-submitted video content, and if you download the new Google Video Viewer you can watch the content directly in Internet Explorer or Firefox on computers running Microsoft Windows.
"We have a lot of content that we've received via the upload program, and we've been overwhelmed with the quality," said Peter Chane, senior product manager for Google Video. The content covers a wide range of subject material, and includes both amateur and professionally produced material.
To find content to view, search for it through the Google Video Search. This is the same interface used to search the television programming that Google has been indexing since December of last year.
The difference is that you can actually play videos uploaded by users, while you can only see stills and transcripts from the television programming. Viewable videos are indicated by a triangular "play" icon at the top of a search result.
To view videos, you first need to download the new Google Video Viewer, a small applet that allows you to click on Google Video search results and view the video directly in your browser. The video viewer is adapted from the open source VideoLan (VLC) player, a small application that plays the mpeg audio and video formats that Google requires for user submitted videos.
Video clips will begin playing from the point where your search terms are found in the audio portion of the video. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well.
To watch some video programming, you'll have to pay a fee. In most cases, this fee was specified by the content owner, not Google, though Google takes a small portion of the fee to defray its costs. The exception is if Google's costs are extraordinary—say for a popular, high resolution video. In that case, Google may arbitrarily charge users a fee if you've specified zero as the price for your video or take a larger revenue share of the price to cover some of these costs.
Google Video search looks at metadata encoded with the video. Chane said many videos were also submitted with transcripts and annotations that are time-coded, allowing playback to begin at the point where your search terms are located in clips.
At this point, there is no categorization, directory-type structure or any other information that lets you know what kind of video content is available—you just have to search and hope for the best. To be fair, the same is true for most other video search services, such as Yahoo Video, though Yahoo does offer an advanced video search that gives you more control over your results.
Chane said that Google plans to continue to add content, and will also make the Google Video Viewer available for other platforms sometime soon.
It will be interesting to see whether the Google Video Viewer is adopted in a widespread fashion. If so, it could establish a new standard platform for playing video on the web—content providers could offer video that would play directly in a browser window, and that content could be hosted anywhere, not just on Google's servers.