Not even two weeks into the New Year and we’re already seeing a few of our ’06 predictions come true. Back in early December we wrote an article noting that despite their godhead reputation and rapid, imperial expansion, Google had yet to pursue a single consumer-based revenue stream. At the same time, we conceded it was only a matter of time before they would ease their way into our pockets. Last Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, two of our predictions were confirmed. Google will finally generate money directly from their users, and will also follow in the path of other entertainment on-demand services by creating a video database.
Just like the deals between iTunes and Disney/ABC, on-demand services were recently contracted between CBS and Comcast, as well as between NBC and DirectTV. Now Google has fortified their video search with a wealth of content across a range of interests provided by CBS, the NBA, and home entertainment powerhouse Image Entertainment (who?).
For the 3 dozen-strong septuagenarian audience who happen to be online with broadband access, Google’s has secured archival shows like ‘Ed Sullivan’, ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘McGuyver’ and ‘Charlie Rose’. This older crowd can cash in their social security checks to download episodes for $1.99 a piece. And in the spirit of the early bird special, episodes of Charlie Rose will be free for the first 24 hours after broadcast.
The younger and more virile crowd has some options too. NBA games will be available for $3.95, in addition to episodes of ‘CSI’ and ‘Survivor Guatemala’ ($1.99 per episode). There’s also an ever-growing assortment of feature length films from Image Entertainment. Example, for up to $14.99, you can download The Knack performing ‘My Sharona’ and their numerous other hits, taped in front of a live audience in Long Beach California some 12 years after they were last relevant. And fans of ‘The 40-Year Old Virgin’ can download a very special Michael McDonald concert video; for just $12.99 you too can play “Yah Mo B There” until a coworker is tempted to “Yah Mo Burn This Place To The Ground”.
Yet the release isn’t about the specific partners or on-demand contents currently being provided. Google’s done something very forward-thinking with their launch strategy. By stockpiling licensed video content, (regardless of the quality) they’re going to get the ball rolling. In reality the intent of Google Video doesn’t seem to be creating a better multimedia engine for pre-existing hosted contents, but rather to host those contents themselves. They’re creating a more grassroots and infinitely scalable storehouse of entertainment content similar to AtomFilms or iFilm. If you sign up for the Google Video Upload Program, you can upload homemade digital video files of any length or size. Pending an approval process, your video clips will be included in the index where users can search, preview, purchase and play those clips. And if you have 1,000 or more hours of more professional content, videos shown on TV or distributed by major motion picture studios, Google’s providing a bulk-upload system. According to Larry Page, the overall strategy is to let anyone sell video, and allow content producers to decide how much to charge.
This strategy dodges all the challenges of creating a more acute multimedia search engine because all the content is being uploaded directly to the Google UI, with whatever information Google requires to index those files. Just last Friday a deal was signed where AOL acquired video-search engine Truveo for about $50 million. Truveo’s technology is slightly more effective than most in crawling the web and detecting which web-pages host video contents. It does this by examining the entire object space to determine whether it contains video or not. From there, the challenge becomes the same: video search engines continue to rely on metadata that creates an association between graphical content and the verbal cues that consumers search by. Google’s encouraging video purveyors to create full transcripts with timelines, so they can hotlink a keyword search straight into the video clip. They’ve even recommended on their site a pair of partner services that can create those transcripts (for roughly $2 per minute).
Ultimately there are no industry standards for authoring multimedia, which is a huge problem, and the engines have yet to resolve this problem. Instead of leading the charge to create a standard set of conventions that might help their crawlers better detect and extract video content, Google’s devised a strategy that saves their search engine the inconvenience of actually searching, let alone evolving. Realizing that their audience is so huge that producers will line up to upload their video content, Google has built a simple, powerful UI to accept these files. Whether this is their short-term solution to the challenges of multimedia search, I’ll leave to you. But consider Google Base, the e-commerce, local and classifieds-ready application whereby marketers can upload their data feeds and contents directly to the algorithm. That UI also takes some of the stress off their actual search spiders to perform.
Google will clearly continue to develop the best technology around, but in the meantime, these moves suggest a brilliant way to cover-up their shortcomings and continue to provide users with the most robust and expansive index of Web content around.
Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.
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