An effort by the dominant search engine to go beyond mere searching, Google Video takes us into the realm of multimedia content, gathering up a rich archive of moving pictures to be accessed either for free or for pay.
Think of Google Video Player as the key to the palace.
Available for Mac or Windows, the player is the only way to access Google Video's for-a-fee content. You can still use other browsers to view the free stuff.
As a video playback mechanism, Video Player has some laudable features. Users can browse through scenes using thumbnails, making it relatively easy to catch just the moment you are looking for.
Google's video player also makes it possible to skip anywhere in the video, watch videos in full-screen mode, and resume downloads automatically. This last function is especially helpful when there is network congestion or when it becomes necessary to disconnect and reconnect later on.
While the video player is a perfectly adequate piece of technology, we are inclined to dislike it on principle, on the grounds that it is too proprietary. With so many video apps going around, why do we need one whose primary function is to play for-pay content out of the Google video library?
Which brings us to the video library itself. In many ways the library is the true test of the Player. If the former is weak, the latter is irrelevant.
Google has considerable competition in its efforts to build a video archive, with popular and well-entrenched players such as YouTube, MetaCafe and iFilm, among others. In its favor, the search engine already has innumerable visitors passing through its main page every day. That's a big marketing opportunity.
Much of the content is amateur produced, thanks to the ease with which authors can post their works to the site. Users can upload videos either through the Google Video website or else through the Google Video Uploader, available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Producers with 1,000 or more hours of video can streamline the process through Google's Premium Program.
