Video delivered through the internet has come a long way since the days of dial-up bandwidth, day-long downloads, and postage-stamp sizes. Faster internet connections and more efficient compression/decompression protocols (like Apple’s h.264 codec, a part of QuickTime 7) make it possible for the delivery of high resolution, DVD-quality video to the computer desktop. Today, online venues like Apple’s iTunes Music Store let viewers purchase and download episodes of their favorite TV shows the morning after they air on the networks. Very soon we’ll be able to download entire feature films for viewing on our computers and iPods, and through them, on our TVs.

Apple’s iTunes Music Store has more or less pioneered the sale of video content, with other players like Google Video, TV networks, and movie studios following suit. Cashing in on the current internet buzzword-du-jour, “community”, other purveyors of video, mostly free video, have emerged. Let’s look at two prominent free video services: Google Video and YouTube. These services differ from the iTunes Music Store in that they solicit videos from viewers, and offer them in diverse formats. Right now, they’re all “free”, but as with much of the internet, the race to find a way to finance the sites and turn them into profit centers is underway.

Both services are browser-based, and offer enormous catalogs of video, running the gamut from TV shows to home movies. In order to save on server space and bandwidth, submitted videos are converted to Flash Video format, which doesn’t have near the quality of QuickTime or Windows Media. Google offers the ability to download some of its videos onto your computer in a format that can only be played with their proprietary Google Video Player software. They also offer “pre-shrunk” versions for video iPods and Sony PlayStation Portables. YouTube videos can only be viewed in the browser window, but enterprising software developers have created programs that will “grab” YouTube videos and save them on your computer in popular formats for later viewing.

Both services also provide the HTML code for viewers to embed videos within their own web pages, blogs, MySpace, and even emails.

Uploaded videos can have descriptive “tags”, or keywords, assigned to them, which help viewers search for categories of interest, like “comedy” or “music videos”.

For example, a search of Google Video for “cute cats” yielded 147 videos, while YouTube offered up 3,428 films of fetching felines.

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski