Google Video Marketplace: It's Up
The mysterious delay has ended and Google Video Marketplace is a reality. To someextent, Google has mashed together user-submitted content with video licensed by major providers such as CBS and theNBA. So, the long-awaited promise to monetize amateur video content is finally realized.
Context & Ripple Effects
After a week of previews — the Wall Street Journal reported on January 5 that Google would offer video downloads alongside new software positioned against Microsoft's, and silicon.com noted the store was set to go live January 9 — the Video Marketplace is now actually up, ending what had become an oddly public delay for a company used to shipping quietly.
The launch pairs user-submitted videos with licensed fare from CBS and the NBA, making Google a paid-distribution channel for both amateurs and major rights holders at once. Reception has been lukewarm: Techdirt's take ('We Sat Around Waiting For Google Video And All We Got Was This?') captures critics who find it underwhelming next to AdSense, Gmail, and Maps. But CBS chief Leslie Moonves has framed the strategic logic plainly — distributing entertainment, news, and sports everywhere and getting paid for it is, in his view, the network's future.
First-order effects
- CBS and the NBA gain a direct-to-consumer paid outlet outside their broadcast windows, while amateur uploaders get Google's long-promised mechanism to charge for their own video.
- Google enters the paid-media business for real, and its first storefront is immediately being judged by the standards of its earlier hits rather than its own merits.
Second-order effects
- The Wall Street Journal framing of Google's companion software as rivaling Microsoft's puts Redmond on notice in the desktop-player space, where the store and the client are a bundle.
- Rival platforms face pressure to answer on two fronts at once — paid professional content and monetized amateur uploads — since Google's pitch collapses the distinction between the two catalogs.
Third-order effects
- If Moonves's 'everywhere, and paid' doctrine spreads among network chiefs, control over distribution windows shifts from broadcasters toward whatever marketplace aggregates demand — a structural transfer of gatekeeping power from networks to platform owners.
- A single shelf mixing $0.99-class amateur clips with network programming would establish open price discovery for video, something the cable-era model never permitted; whether consumers accept paying through a search company rather than a broadcaster is the open question the skeptics are betting against.
The trend: Television and film rights holders are beginning to sell directly through open download marketplaces, moving video pricing out of network-controlled windows and into platform-run stores where amateur and professional content share a shelf.