Back in August 2008, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that they were still trying to figure out how to make money with YouTube.
This week, in an attempt to help solve their predicament, they’ve starting offering video downloads…for a price.
Here’s how it works. You’re browsing YouTube, watching videos. You see one you like…and…you’d like to be able to download it so you can watch it “offiline”, say for example on your iPod.
Well now, with select video producers on YouTube, you can do exactly that. For these partners, a “download this video” link (along with a price) will appear below the video. When you click on this link, you’ll be taken to Google Checkout where you can purchase the video and download it in a high-quality MP4 format:
(to see the live video on YouTube, show in the image above, click here)
But here’s the rub. You can already download videos from YouTube…for free…using a variety of free browser plugins. That means for the example video above, you wouldn’t need to pay 99 cents to download it…you can just download it with a free browser plugin.
The catch is that you’d be downloading an FLV file…which isn’t playable on most portable devices. However, there are also a number of tools available that will convert FLV files to the MP4 format…solving that problem.
So it appears that Google is banking on viewer ignorance when it comes to web video. It’s banking that the vast majority of web video viewers don’t know how to download videos from YouTube…and…they certainly don’t know how to convert these downloaded videos into the MP4 format.
So copyright issues aside, you can bet that if YouTube is successful with this new “pay to download” feature, that there will soon be a plethora of software tools available, from third-parties, that are designed to download and convert YouTube videos to the MP4 format for you…and all with just a couple clicks.
It will be interesting to see if it actually gets this far…or if Google’s pay-to-download-what-you-can-already-watch-for-free model fails right out of the gate.
I can see this feature more of a ‘convenience’ in downloading the already converted mp4. For many busy people, paying $.99 for a download is more cost effective than the time to spend downloading and then converting the file again to mp4 to make it portable. Especially if you are traveling and in the run. Of course, the information in such video must be of great content too.