Google launches Google Video Viewer
As predicted by John Battelle, Google launched its Google Video site today with the free videos people were asked to upload back in April along with its own Google Video Viewer based on the open source (and most excellent) VideoLAN player. To be honest, I'm not too impressed. Searching for anything on Google Video still brings up almost exclusively TV content that you can't actually watch, and since there's no way to tell it to search only for free videos, finding them is tricky. If you just want to try it out, there's an "interesting videos" page, but none of them are actually interesting (though the "How to Tie a Sarong" girl is cute). The videos themselves play in the browser, and the quality is good, but the viewer component has absolutely no UI, and as far as I can tell no options, though double-clicking on the video will make it launch full-screen. There's no progress bar and more than once the videos stopped or stuttered, making me wish for the first time ever for a "Buffering..." indicator. I have no doubt that Google will be taking their Video venture in interesting directions, but this feels very little like a finished (or useful) product.
