Google Video To Launch Actual Video Today

John Battelle reports that Google Video today will begin offering user contributed videos that have been uploaded since April (see Google Wants Your Video). In addition, users will be able to view the actual video within search results. At the moment, the service only displays content gathered mostly from television resources and only still clips are displayed, not video.

John doesn't specifically say whether it was Google itself that confirmed the news to him or rather a third party contact. Google is neither directly quoted or cited in his report.

Dirson left a comment on John's blog pointing at a Dutch blog that appears to have spotted an accidental post from the official Google Blog about the new features (and here, with Dirson comment and reprint here).

Since Google itself has leaked some of the news, we can also confirm we've been briefed about the new features that are planned to be formally announced today.

Chris Sherman will be bringing further details in SearchDay when Google lifts the embargo for those who have been prebriefed or gives us the go ahead directly to publish more.

Google isn't the only service to show user contributed video, of course. Our past article, Yahoo Launches Video Search Prototype, New Media RSS Format, covers Yahoo Video. It gathers content from crawling the web (unlike Google Video) and has an RSS feeding mechanism.

SingingFish from AOL has long accepted contributions and feed content, as well. Blinkx TV is another service that gathers by crawling and contributions. See Gary's past post, A Look At Other Video Search Tools, for more about these.

The key difference in what Google Video will offer compared to other services is inline playback. Rather than having to depend on having a particular plug-in for a particular video format -- which your browser will often annoyingly opens in a separate window -- Google Video will provide its own lightweight plug-in to display video right within the results.