AOL Video & Google Video Step Up Game

The online giants are waking up as YouTube continues to soar. More than 12 million unique visitors per month watch over 40 million videos per day on YouTube, making it the undusputed leader for online video. The silver and bronze go to MSN and MySpace. Google remains fourth, and has made two changes recently. First, it’s compressing the period between upload and live (it used to be days or weeks). Second, it’s catching up with a web-based uploader. The real problem with Google is its homepage is too commercial (with emphasis on selling videos), and there’s hardly any structure to the mass of videos. I’ve still got my money on Google for three reasons:
1) Google’s core competency is search and advertising. These are more vital than anything for online video.
2) Google’s huge, and they can’t afford to NOT have a place in online video as it grows dramatically. They’ve been fairly quiet, and I’m guessing they’ll launch a dramatically new approach to Google Video in the coming months.
3) The minute Google allows a homepage search to identify videos (like its image searcher) is the minute you short the stocks of the other companies.
That being said, Google Video will coexist with online video sites in the long term. Why? Google doesn’t want to host the world’s information; they want to make it searchable. So I’m not sure they care to be an online video hoster and streamer as long as they take us all from our video need to the destination. Tempting, though, isn’t it? The site that streams the video has the eyeballs during the viewing, and that’s where the ad dollars are going to explode.

For more: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060517-6850.html