Google, Yahoo, the world and video

Peter Chane, senior product manager for Google Video, articulated Google's goal in the video space at the Building Block conference in San Jose today. Google will become the "one site with all videos in the world and deliver an experience that works," Chane said. "In less than a year, you can go to Google Video [to find videos] no matter where it is on the Web, and we will monetize any video no matter where it is on the Web."

He added that Google provides unlimited uploads. "We have people who drive to Google with a carload of hard drives and we try to help them," Chane said.

However, today sites such as Yahoo, Blinx and AOL are providing the most comprehensive video search capabilities. Google Video search currently only scours what is hosted by Google. Yahoo has a searchable index of 30 million videos, according to Jason Zajac, general manager of social media, Search & Marketplace at Yahoo. He said that Yahoo has a similar goal to Google's, which he expressed as becoming the place to discover online the world of video. "We absolutely want to seach all the world's video," Zajac told me. Where Yahoo will differentiate from other sites, Zajac said, is in going beyond comprehensiveness, freshness and relevance to include user intent and personalization--the Yahoo social media meme.

In the hosted video space, YouTube dominates. Yahoo serves millions of videos per day in news, sports

and other categories, but not much of its is from the so-called user generated content. I asked Zajac (at right) about Yahoo's plans to compete with YouTube, but he only said that the user-generated hosted portion is growing. Zajac did say that Yahoo will announce some deals with a few high profile creators of user-generated content soon, and that Yahoo would find more ways to do performance-based revenue sharing with the content creators at the head (premium content) and tail (YouTubers).

For video, as with text, there will be a few search engines that dominate, a few major portals with search, hosting and sharing services, and thousands of other sites enabled by technologies like Revver's APIs that allow anyone to become a creator, producer, distributor and  to have a revenue stream.