News of the enhanced google video service was announced today, and the effects across the video industry could be amazing. Truly there are many pluses and minuses to the new service, but one thing is for sure, google offering a 70/30 split of revenues for content producers, and giving access to a quick video upload and world wide delivery service, will put very small video producers into the game without the television network executives getting in the way… This new video delivery / rev share service is bound to become a major portal for many internet users, and may be another form of user chosen entertainment that will take even more time from the traditional boob tube.

This new service will obviously put a major competitive strain on many other video on demand services already online. Online video companies such as revver must be biting thier nails about the future onlinevideo profitability outlook
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Very interesting post by John Battelle’s Searchblog…

John Battelle’s Searchblog
What is really interesting is the pricing leverage: Google is splitting revenues 70/30 – that’s 70 to the content producer. Also very important is that the producers of content are the ones who set the price – again, totally different from traditional models. Thirdly, Google is doing its own DRM. That’s very interesting, and probably best left as the subject of another post. Producers can decide to not use DRM, as Charlie Rose did, Feiken told me.

This is a major step toward entirely new models of content distribution, and if I were Comcast, DirecTV, the telcos, or frankly anyone in the traditional video business, I’d be a bit concerned. It gives content producers far more power to connect directly to audiences, and the leverage will only increase – in five years, it won’t be 70/30, it’ll more likely by 80/20. Gary has a good roundup of some of Google’s competitors in video. Clearly they are not the only player here, and the video/content industry has no interest in insuring that one party owns distribution.

More news and opinions about the google video story breaking today were found at Boing Boing.

As of today there is no direct link from google.com for the video service, although today searching for “google video” yields results for http://video.google.com/. Suprisingly there is also no mention of the new google video services on the official google blog either. Instead today the google blog featured a post about the new google pack download, and a link to that new product is listed on the google.com page today just under the standard google search box.