ctrl.altered.mind

When Google Video was launched back in June, 2005, not many could guess where Google wanted to take their new promising venture. The picture gets clearer now as Google Video has its own store where you can purchase copyrighted content such as TV shows and other video clips, that are protected by Google’s own DRM. While this initiative looks more promising than Apple’s range of offering via the iTunes Music (and Video?) Store, there are some more plusses to Google Video. To start with, you can upload your own videos, and also earn revenue from them. There is a ton of open rights content available already, and a good place to start looking is the Popular Videos section on the main page. The feature I liked the most, is the link that Google adds next to the video that allows you to put it on your own website. Some HTML code is generated, that can be easily copy-pasted into your blog page, for example, and a Flash-based embedded video interface is added. Its even easier to feature your choice of open rights video content on your page, with virtually no online storage cost (the video streams directly from Google, of course).

Here’s a video that I thought I’d propagate - the concept of a Matrix-style table tennis match is totally awesome.

And here’s a ‘Dodge this’ video, Lego style.

Then again, as Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon) says, ‘Down with DRM!’. On his ‘So Sue Me’ blog, he’s posted some code that allows you to remove the restricting feature in the Google Video Player that prevents playback of videos not hosted on Google servers (running the patch requires .NET runtime).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 10:21 am and is filed under Google.