Google Video after some thought

So, google video is getting pretty much across the board bad reviews since the store launched. The usual issues raised are the lack of browse functionality, and listing of for-pay offerings separately from free ones. Turns out people want google to list them separately. Google is relying on their central search to find the things you need, but when a person has a credit card in hand, and types in star trek, they only want star trek, preferably in some sort of order (other than relevance).

Here’s my take. Don’t compare google video with iTunes, they are not the same product at all. Google Video is a place where normal people can sell content, perhaps only mediated by google on the back-end. You can already stream video to your site without it being entirely obvious where it is coming from. At what point will google allow you to sell it directly? This is a place where there could be a large number of videos in formats that are not indexable by humans. With the addition of tagging for navigation on their site, and selling directly from other sites added google could be very well positioned for a rise in low production cost digital media that everyone predicts will happen immenently. The cost reductions in HD video cameras and an increasingly burdensome DRM regime only make this trend happen faster.

iTunes on the other hand requires a lot of human interaction on Apple’s part, that’s ok though, because Apple’s profit structure is completely different. They are selling iPods don’t forget. Those artist pages for almost every major recording personality don’t create themselves, neither does the new music podcast, or the constantly changing ads. iTunes is a place to go for mainstream content. And no, I don’t mean only top 40, we are in the digital age and even workflows that require human interaction can handle large numbers. iTunes isn’t about to move into the long tail, however, Google Video started in the long tail, and has moved the other direction towards adding commercial content.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t some problems, if I were CBS for example I would be exceptionally disappointed, search for CSI on google video, when I do the CBS version isn’t my number one hit. So, they are going to have to deal with that relationship. And until they add tagging, or some sort of user-based characterization of the content the google video site itself isn’t very rewarding, but I’m sure that will come soon. iTunes will remain a place to get high quality content in a very user friendly way for the foreseeable future, but when you start to download that weekly tech show that gets 700 viewers google video, I think, will emerge as the answer.