SAN FRANCISCO -- Move over blogging -- here comes Internet-based home video, to a Google server near you.
While there’s no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google’s servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data.
“It’s an experiment we want to run,” said Page of the video-uploading service, which he said the company will formally announce “in the next few days.” Page made the non-announcement announcement during Monday’s opening panel discussion at the National Cable & Telecommunications Show here, upstaging his luminary fellow panelists John Chambers of Cisco, Brian Roberts of Comcast, Jon Miller of AOL and Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks.
The news did fit into the main theme of the panel’s discussion, which was how video-enabled material will change the face of communications, sooner rather than later. Cisco’s Chambers said just video’s data needs will require new kinds of network thinking, since “one half hour of video [traffic] is equal to a half a year of email.”
But Google’s video-upload plans were clearly the buzz of the morning, and in typical Google spirit of launching things in beta form, the idea seems to not be fully baked. Page even said Google wasn’t sure what types of material Google would receive, which drew a quick rejoinder from Katzenberg, who said, “I can tell you what you’re going to get,” drawing laughter from the audience.
