Google Video (via Crooked Timber) looks very interesting, some it really good, some of it really bad. It is a mixture of films, private videos, TV clips, etc. A good measure of this mixture both of content and quality can be seen in what are currently the two most popular items:
- The Top Gear clip of Jeremy Clarkson comparing racing a car round a track on a Playstation then trying the same car on the same track in real life (good).
- Cha. Vs. Wall in which someone, presumably called Cha., runs into a wall then proceeds to writhe around in pain for a short duration (bad, though mercifully short at 17 seconds).
I may be being unfair in that I saw the Top Gear clip on telly and I don’t have sound on this computer so may be missing some of the more pertinent nuances of Cha. Vs. Wall.My three year old son loves trains and I’ve been struggling to find good video footage on the web for him to watch, especially of British trains he sees regularly. Although there’s not a lot in quantity, the Google Video search made it really easy to quickly find some good stuff.
I’ll be very interested to see how this develops, whether it goes more commercial and ends up somewhere significant to purchase video material (there’s a lot of paid content, including full-length films already), whether it ends up a dustbin of awful and dubious home videos, or whether it sinks without trace. It looks like they are prepared for a mix of the first two, as they have neatly segregated the Store and the Popular sections. We’ll see.