WSJ.com - Google to Offer Video Downloads, Software That Rivals Microsoft's
Under the major upgrade to Google's video-search service, consumers will be able to pay to download and view videos, such as television shows, on their computers from Google content partners such as TV companies, people familiar with the matter say. Google plans to announce partnerships with some major players tomorrow, including CBS Corp. and the National Basketball Association, these people say. By virtue of Google's huge presence online, the move could place Google in competition with other emerging powers in Internet distribution of video such as Apple Computer Inc.Also in the mix, a software bundle that includes the various Google downloads (Picasa, Google Talk, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, and Google Earth) along with anti-malware tools, and the odd utility.
Some details of Google's online video service remain unclear, such as how much content owners might charge consumers to download their videos. Google last year had said it planned to allow content owners to charge for videos, but it hadn't activated that feature. Interest in delivering video over the Internet has surged since October, when Apple began offering downloads of popular TV shows through a partnership with Walt Disney Co. Google has developed its own digital-rights-management software to protect downloaded videos from piracy.
It would be silly for production companies to limit distribution of their shows to exclusive deals with a single network partner. It would limit their reach and hamper their ability to measure various business models against one another. Google and Yahoo!, for example, don't have the iPod angle that Apple does, but Apple has yet to incorporate advertising into their revenue model. The different models carry different strategic implications for the way value gets passed back through the chain from customer to distributor to producer.
How will these services evolve to take us beyond buy, download, and watch? Will Google and Apple bring their massive infrastructure into play and allow customers to store their shows online, to be viewed whenever they have a broadband connection? Does Apple have a hardware advantage, allowing them to give their customers an easy option to take shows, movies, and music off the network and watch it in the living room? How can Google (or Yahoo! or Microsoft) respond?
Interesting times, indeed. It would be a shame if Big Content manages to kill all this excitement.
Apple, Google, and Yahoo! are the new TV networks.
