Google Launches Video For Business Platform
Thanks to the TechCrunch blog for alerting me to this soon to be made announcement about a new Google video publishing platform that brings YouTube into the enterprise and behind the firewall!
Google is making it much easier for companies to allow their employees to create and share videos internally without fearing the information will get out to the general Internet. I’m so excited about this that I’ve already signed Crow Digital Media up and will be testing it out very soon! The formal announcement is supposed to come later today (meaning Tuesday). Part of Google Apps Premiere Edition, Google is providing both the streaming video publishing platform and storage space for the actual videos.
It’s called “Google video for Business.” Click the link below for the information I have so far.
Again this is for internal use only, meaning it is designed for companies to allow their employees to quickly and easily create, upload and share videos with each other. All it takes is a simple Webcam and an Internet connection for an employee to publish a video to the site. Training is one of their highlighted applications but video could simply be used as an alternative to sending text email messages to colleagues. One of the great features I wanted to check out is that each video is automatically segmented into “scenes” and viewers are able to skip ahead to watch the scenes they are most interested in.
No longer do companies have to worry about building out expensive server infrastructure or launching a huge new development effort.
The application is entirely Web-based and provides a user experience very much like YouTube meaning videos can be rated, tagged and team members can even write comments about individual videos. I believe there is also an embed function but that you would only be allowed to embed a video into another page within the same site (the same “domain” in Web speak)
Another aspect worth pointing out is that the video functions are integrated within the Google Apps online suite meaning sharing emails, calendars, docs, site bookmarks and even chat.
There is a small cost: “$50 / user account / year.” I’m not 100% sure how they define a user yet but I suspect that an employee simply browsing videos internally does not incur a user fee. I would think that only when an employee wants to be able to create and upload videos to the site would the fee kick in.
Google is also announcing a new Web browser called Chrome which is going to shake things up a lot for Microsoft which is sure to have a hissy fit over this, but that’s a subject for another post. In the meantime, I will be sharing more news about this exciting Video platform development in the coming days.
Tags: google, online video, video publishing, youtube