Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Google's concerns for storing video for major producers
One thing Google's working on for Google Video is apparently an upload program specifically for major content producers, like TV affiliates, networks, and production houses. Such isn't available at the moment, perhaps for reasons I'll now discuss.
Storing, archiving and indexing professional productions is a monstrous challenge, seeing as how the content to be uploaded from these resources will likely be of longer format than the 40-second homemade lip synch video or de facto video blogs that are in such great distribution now, making for bandwidth and storage space concerns. Such content will also surely be more time-sensitive, like news reports, and will be uploaded with greater frequency, meaning that the review process will need to be expedited or some sort of trust relationship established between Google and the contenrt producer to ensure legitimacy of content while streamlining the process of making video accessible without an unreasonable wait.
Also, once Google opens up its web search video service to professional production shops, the population of publishers is going to jump exponentially over what it is now. I've made it no secret that even though my company, a TV/radio station and web shop in Guam, does a lot of archival of our own video in our webcast archives, we're planning on strategically having a limited amount of our stuff exposed through Google Video as well so that more people discover our work. But even though we plan to mirror some of the multimedia content we publish to our own site, certainly many companies will forego the traditional approach of self-hosting from their own properties and publish exclusively to Google Video, sacrificing traffic to their own site for greater exposure.
Simply put, once the company makes the service available to those who do video for a living, the floodgates are going to be opened. Google can't reasonably be expected to archive tens of thousands of hours of video from all over the world for free...can it? Such would draw the ire of web hosting companies that support video packages, destroying their economy. I expect some sort of paid membership access for pros to arise, and I'd gladly be willing to fork out the money to be part of it.
But my concerns are merely the assumptions based on current standards and behavior patterns, in lieu of new and creative tools used to manage video content. I've been pleasantly surprised before with the innovations that have come out of Mountain View. I hope to be shocked in similar fashion again.
Storing, archiving and indexing professional productions is a monstrous challenge, seeing as how the content to be uploaded from these resources will likely be of longer format than the 40-second homemade lip synch video or de facto video blogs that are in such great distribution now, making for bandwidth and storage space concerns. Such content will also surely be more time-sensitive, like news reports, and will be uploaded with greater frequency, meaning that the review process will need to be expedited or some sort of trust relationship established between Google and the contenrt producer to ensure legitimacy of content while streamlining the process of making video accessible without an unreasonable wait.
Also, once Google opens up its web search video service to professional production shops, the population of publishers is going to jump exponentially over what it is now. I've made it no secret that even though my company, a TV/radio station and web shop in Guam, does a lot of archival of our own video in our webcast archives, we're planning on strategically having a limited amount of our stuff exposed through Google Video as well so that more people discover our work. But even though we plan to mirror some of the multimedia content we publish to our own site, certainly many companies will forego the traditional approach of self-hosting from their own properties and publish exclusively to Google Video, sacrificing traffic to their own site for greater exposure.
Simply put, once the company makes the service available to those who do video for a living, the floodgates are going to be opened. Google can't reasonably be expected to archive tens of thousands of hours of video from all over the world for free...can it? Such would draw the ire of web hosting companies that support video packages, destroying their economy. I expect some sort of paid membership access for pros to arise, and I'd gladly be willing to fork out the money to be part of it.
But my concerns are merely the assumptions based on current standards and behavior patterns, in lieu of new and creative tools used to manage video content. I've been pleasantly surprised before with the innovations that have come out of Mountain View. I hope to be shocked in similar fashion again.
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