Google Video

http://video.google.com/

One of the latest branches of the rapidly growing google net empire, which includes google earth and google mail among others. With google video, anyone is free to upload video files, provided they have copyright ownership, and these are then available for anyone to download, after a content screening process. The owner of the video is free to let anyone upload their work for free, or they may choose to charge for access to their content, of which google video gets a cut.

The process seems simple enough, and I was able to start uploading one of my films this evening, after a quick sign up process and having to download the required “windows uploader” software. In a sense, by uploading content to the web you are surrendering the control you have over it while it remains in the analog plain. From now on, anyone will be able to watch my film as they choose, until the time that I take it down that is. In any case I thought it would be interesting to have my film seen by random people, potentially over the globe.

It is in spaces such as these that would seem to promote a more democratic relationship between producers and consumers, as anyone is able to upload videos as well as download them. The only dominant player here is google, who owns the site and the controls access etc, but users of the service are more or less equals.

It will definetely be interesting to see how similar such spaces develop in the near future, as the line between producer and consumer on the internet continues to be blurred, at least among what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, “internet and media enthusiasts”.

My film is still uploading as I finish posting this, looks like it will take a while (7/312mb uploaded), so as always there are technical limitations to all such developments