Coming soon in Web video: Googlers bearing gifts

SAN FRANCISCO Fellow journalists, it’s past time to retire the conventional description of Google: “the Mountain View, Calif., Web-search firm.”

If that wasn’t clear prior to, it should be apparent following this week’s Google I/O conference right here, dominated by a series of ambitious initiatives in such non-search markets as Web movie and television software program.

But in another sense, this week’s announcements represented Search engines as usual. They fit into an old template: giving away a service or software program that other companies charge for, frequently in inferior forms. Google’s reward is more people spending more time online, and therefore a larger marketplace for its Web ads.

Users just have to decide regardless of whether every Search engines providing performs as advertised, justifies exposing some of their data and, progressively, merits spending still more of the lives in Google’s globe.

This week, Google’s most-rewarding gift might be a Internet video format that may end a prolonged and sometimes pointless squabble over how we observe Television and movie clips on the internet.

Adobe’s broadly installed Flash Player owns that market these days. But its efficiency and security problems have left it widely unloved, and it doesn’t work in most cellular products these days.

Till Wednesday, that solution looked to be a commercial format called H.264 that’s free of charge for most individuals to use but may not be following 2015. As a outcome, the second most-popular browser, Mozilla Firefox, won’t perform H.264.

Google’s answer was to donate a movie format known as VP8 under open-source, royalty-free terms, then combine that using the open-source Vorbis audio format into a new WebM multimedia regular.

Chrome, Firefox and Opera will assistance this; Microsoft’s Web Explorer and Apple’s Safari won’t, but because Adobe’s Flash Player will also perform WebM content, the opposition of Microsoft and Apple may not matter, nor may WebM possibly performing slightly worse than H.264. But iPhone and iPad users may find themselves cut away from a growing share of video.

Then there’s Google Television, its new software to connect the Television with the Internet. When it ships this fall on Sony HDTVs and Blu-ray players and a Logitech set-top box, it ought to let you find points to observe — on cable, satellite or the internet — with far more ease than traditional plan guides.

Because it runs Google’s Chrome Internet browser, with Flash included, it should play almost any online video (although websites such as the progressively obstructionist Hulu could block Google Television). And simply because it is Android underneath, it can run numerous Android apps.

Considering other firms’ clumsy or apathetic efforts — such as Apple’s neglected Apple Tv — the marketplace needs somebody to wake points up. Google could perform the same constructively disruptive role here that it did in Web-mail.

Google also unveiled a major update to its Android operating program. This Android 2.two release — called “Froyo,” short for “frozen yogurt,” as component of Google’s habit of naming Android releases following desserts — consists of a lengthy list of features on numerous Android users’ wish lists.

For instance, Google says Froyo runs individual Android apps from two to five occasions quicker than Android 2.1, or Eclair. Internet pages ought to also feel snappier, thanks to better JavaScript support; in one of many jabs at Apple, a demonstration showed a Froyo phone outrunning an iPad in a benchmark test.

Froyo will also consist of Adobe’s Flash player. If this software program does not extract a cost in efficiency or battery existence, it will give Android a brand new benefit more than Apple’s iPhone — Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has publicly banned Flash from its cellular products.

Even should you like your iPhone, you should appreciate Apple’s phone obtaining stronger competition from Android. Apple has exceptionally fixed suggestions about what people want inside a phone, and the most effective examine to its control-freak instincts is a compelling alternative in the market.

I’m less enthused by Google’s third major customer product introduction, its Chrome Shop. The concept at the rear of this Web storefront, to become integrated into its Chrome browser later this year, is to make it as simple to get Internet applications as it would be to add software program to an Android device or iPhone.

But the world wide web already provides capable tools to discover Web apps: search, links and bookmarks.

I am much more enthusiastic about seeing what developers can cook up utilizing the web standards Google promoted on the very first day with the conference. The graphically enriched, interactive Web edition of Sports Illustrated demonstrated throughout that morning’s keynote ought to appear and function as nicely in Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Opera Software’s eponymous browser. (The weak standards compliance of Microsoft’s Web Explorer leaves it at the rear of; the fact that Search engines was comfortable brushing aside IE speaks to Microsoft’s crumbling relevance on the world wide web.)

But Google I/O also supplied a helpful reminder that Google’s latest gifts rely on network machinery that can seize up. Both keynotes had been interrupted repeatedly by wireless bugs; several occasions throughout Thursday’s event, presenters asked individuals within the audience to shut away Bluetooth wireless on their phones to free up the airwaves.

Keep that cringe-inducing exhibit of technological frailties in mind before you order one of everything off Google’s menu.

The Washington Post