The Google Video service has just released a new player, based on the great French piece of code: VLC.
From this online review:
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. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well.
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.
Google also plans to offer the ability for content owners to charge a fee for users to view video. Google will take a small portion of the fee to defray its costs. Chane did not say when Google plans to implment this pay-per-view feature, though it's likely to use the online payment system that Google is developing.
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.
This reminds me of the services of another startup I've started mentionning recently ,). Just scroll down or check the right bar ;)
Last week, in France, a new VOD startup (La Banque Audiovisuelle) announced its new service, vodeo.tv, and a business-angel round of 2,5m€. Another company I know of might be announcing something nice also.
Earlier last week, I talked about Marc Andresseen being involved with 24HL, a - it seems - video blogging tool. And the list could go on and on: vimeo, akimbo, prodigem, gofish, google video, shift.tv, cybertelly, archive.org, ourmedia.org, mobuzz.tv, orb, dave.tv, actlab.tv, brightcove, youtube, pooxi, mefedia, etc.
Don't you think that after the huge hype about text (blogs), currently about audio (podcasting), the next big thing is video (vlogging and videocasting ?). I do...
