At the beginning of this year, Google announced a partnership with DivX Inc. that will make Google Video easy to integrate with electronic devices.
"Google and DivX can work together in the connected home to give consumers, content providers and consumer electronics manufacturers the freedom to move content across secure devices and platforms which are affordable, easy to use, and provide for greater access to richer, more meaningful digital media," says Jordan Greenhall from DivX.
"Our goal with Google Video is to make the world's video content accessible to people, and working with DivX is a very important step toward extending that service beyond the PC to consumer electronics devices," adds Susan Wojcicki from Google.
Yahoo already has Yahoo Go, an initiative that allows you to connect your PC, TV and mobile phone and make it easy to migrate the data from one device to another one. One of the feature of Yahoo Go is playing videos from Yahoo Video on your TV.
The DivX video compression technology offers DVD quality at up to 10 times the compression of MPEG2 files, so it's a good fit for online video. Google Video already encodes video in DivX4 and audio as MP3, so they can play on most DivX-enabled DVD players. The problem is that videos need to have higher resolution to be suitable for TV.
When the contextual video ads will be ready for prime time and more premium videos will be available on Google Video, will this be the future of TV? You'll watch only the programs you like, you'll be able to select from pre-configured channels or create your own channel for free. The ads will be targeted to the program and to you (as you'll login to a Google Account), so they'll be more relevant for advertisers and yourself. We only need a device to make this easy and straightforward.
Related:
A brief history of Google Video
What's next for Google Video?
