Google video has seen 4 major changes in direction since its launch. While the average surfer may not have noticed these changes being subtly made over the last 32 months, these changes show how Google got online video wrong… three times.
Google Video Gets it Wrong Once – TV Guide
In January 2005 Google launched Google Video as a place that lets people search through regular broadcast TV programs.
It was kind of an advanced TV Guide/Search facility where users could search the content of TV programs, see relevant thumbnail images of the programs, and discover where and when to tune into the programs on television.
Google co-founder Larry Page said that “What Google did for the web, Google Video aims to do for television”. It worked by indexing still video captures from broadcast TV from over 20 stations.
The whole idea was a bit odd and didn’t take off and slowly diminished by the end of 2005. In April that year Google launched a user video upload program allowing people to share videos. Google was onto something, but then came mistake number 2:
Google Video Gets it Wrong Twice – Pay Per View
Back in early 2006 Google made its second mistake when they officially launched video.google.com as a place to buy and sell online video. Examples of content available included John Wayne’s 1934 movie Blue Steel for sale for $1.99 and a Heat-Hornets basketball game for $3.95 as well as user content.
Google’s idea was to allow “any content creator will be able to sell their videos at a price of their choosing using the Google Video Upload Program.” Google banked on the fact that people would jump at the chance to buy pay-per-view video online.
Google got it wrong again… people are happy buying movies and TV shows in the normal offline fashion, a habit that is proving hard to change thanks to aggressive DRM. People wanted short free clips to keep them quickly entertained.
This was all happening just as YouTube was being born. YouTube had a completely different philosophy: Get people to upload videos and share them for free, and what’s more, allow other sites to republish those videos.
Google Video Gets it Wrong for the Third Time – Too Late to Copy YouTube
During the phenomenally quick growth of YouTube Google soon realized the potential of this whole video sharing idea and made improvements to its system. In May 2006 Google encouraged people to join in and upload more videos and at some point allowed its videos to be embedded on other sites, just like YouTube.
During this period Google also dabbled in “download to own” music videos while also offering the same streaming versions for free online, but this model also soon petered away.
Despite these efforts Google couldn’t attract anywhere near the attention that YouTube was getting, and was also losing out to rival Yahoo.
The folks at Google will have realized that the only way to dominate in the booming internet video space would be to get its hands on YouTube which had quickly become the leading video site in the world. In November 2006 Google acquired YouTube.
Google Video gets it Right
If anyone had asked what a search engine giant should do when it comes to video, most would think; “make a video search engine”.
Instead Google tried out a variety of ideas which ultimately didn’t work. Don’t get me wrong, I have huge respect for Google as an innovative company and respect a lot of what the company does.
Google now dominates video so it eventually got it right – big time, but it’s just interesting to see the stumbling blocks that appeared on Google’s journey to online video domination. The YouTube aquisition was obviously the biggest factor in Google’s success.
Google Video 4th Change- The Video Search Engine
Google is now becoming a full video search engine. Something I’ll be looking at in my next post…
