Google has outlined some of its future strategy regarding Google Video and YouTube, in a blog post by Salar Kamangar, VP of Project Management. It was always going to be interesting to see what Google did after its acquisition of YouTube given the close similarity of YouTube to its pre-existing Google Video.
They appear to have thought what the two products are for, to work out what to do with them in the future. They came up with this:
Google’s strength — and its history — is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide.
What lays behind that statement is a recognition that YouTube is supported by an enormous network of users who enjoy using its social networking features. Google Video does not have such a network. It therefore makes sense to find a role for YouTube which leverages this network, and a role for Google Video which moves away from attempting to build such a network and into an entirely different sphere.
It seems that Google are doing this by moving Google Video back to its routes as a way to search for video content (initially Google Video was a way to search within video content, although it did not host the videos, and you weren’t able to watch them). Kamangar writes:
Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.
To that end, Google is including YouTube videos in results for Google Video from today.
So, where could they move Google Video to in the future in order to further support their vision? One idea might be to buy Pluggd, the podcast directory and now search engine. Pluggd has a great technology which allows you to search for terms inside audio files, and then see where they occur the most on a heat map. Whilst this currently works only for audio files, I imagine it would be trivial to make it work with video codecs. It will be interesting to see whether Google is willing to include videos hosted on rivals to YouTube on Google Video; on the one hand, it would make GVideo infinitely more useful, but on the other could move significant traffic to competitors. Definitely a conflict of interest there, and it will be a test of Google’s “evilness” to see what their decision is.
All in all, as rich media becomes more and more important on the web, it is clear that Google is aware of the need to make sure that it is in a good position to become dominant in the new area as well as the old, and the strategy they announced today looks like it will go a long way to achieving that.
