Ad-supported videos on Google is going to be big. Why? Because it is going to provide an economic incentive for content providers.
Right now I’m watching a recorded episode of the Charlie Rose show (late 2005) in which Charlie interviews Walt Mossberg and Netflix founder Reed Hastings. Normally Google and the Charlie Rose show charges .99 to watch an episode. However, Google is trying out their new ad-supported video feature and some of the Rose shows are included in this program.
If you select the ad route, a text banner appears above the video, in a none-annoying way. You can click on the link to the ad at any time and a separate window will appear with the ad’s contents. The video keeps playing during this time.
It’s a really nice offering and I bet it’s going to be game changing for many small publishers.
On the downside though, the Google video viewing page gets a little cramped on small displays (such as an UMPC display which is only 640×480). You can’t bring the video to full screen. I’m assuming that the full screen option is not available because the ad would not appear. Seems like this would be fixable. Even if that is not possible it would be nice to be able to hide the Google navigation bar across the top of the page to gain some more viewing space. To the Google engineers: I can understand why the ad needs to be there, but why does all that white space need to appear? I don’t get it. There’s still some more thinking to be done here.