Hard to say “no” to this YouTube offer
In a pretty significant announcement this morning, Google is broadening the scope of open applications that developers can use to interact with YouTube and its player. The end game, according to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, is the original concept of Google Video — to host all of the video on the Web.
Once again, instead of making it easier to search videos elsewhere, Google is making it easier to host videos on YouTube. Except that the new APIs allow people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other Websites. The key here is that the videos themselves are hosted on Youtube’s servers……YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of Yahoo), and Move Networks.
By offering developers the ability to actually alter the user interface of the player, Google is making it very hard to say no. One day, we may see local news sites using the YouTube player instead of their own. If they can customize and monetize it, why not? The hosting and bandwidth costs go away. It certainly raises the bar for creating an appealing local video portal.
Google continues to confound the experts by giving things away. And that, my friends, is why it is so bloody disruptive.
March 12th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
…and how much revenue do the content producers make / share?
March 13th, 2008 at 6:15 am
[…] You Tube are opening their API - Terry Heaton thinks that Google have a plan - to host all video on the web! …YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of Yahoo), and Move Networks. […]
March 15th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Not to paint Google with a tar brush, but this technique was pioneered by Microsoft.
When Microsoft gave IE away it disrupted the entire web-browser field. Doing that, however, helped bring millions to the web, making it possible to make money through advertising supported sites like Yahoo!
Perhaps free video hosting will have a similar positive effect.