Unimpressed With The Google Video Store?
So, the Google Video Store is live, and, ehh. Nothing special.
- $40 health care videos?
- Uneven selection of CBS shows, missing key episodes of big series and with few episodes of others
- 176 episodes of The Charlie Rose Show?
- A very uneven list of mostly commercially useless old stuff, like Rescue From Gilligan’s Island, The Lucy Show, old John Wayne movies, Dick Tracy, but all for only $1.99. Also includes original versions of movies you liked in the more modern versions (Chronicles of Narnia, animated; the 1960 Little Shop of Horrors).
- Videos on Nobel Prize winners, for the same $1.99
- Golf retrospectives, for seven bucks
- An Ed Sullivan special, in two parts, for $9.99 for each part
- Music videos from Sony BMG, some free, some $1.99
- Teen Kids News, for 99 cents
- Wheels TV, “vehicle-based entertainment”, for 99 cents
- Wimbledon specials, for $7
So, besides a complete lack of quality content (save for CBS), a lack of complete sets (for CBS content, and other TV shows), there’s a big problem with inconsistency in pricing. I commend Google for not engaging in price fixing, a tack that works well for music (where lengths and perceived value are roughly uniform) but is an awful idea for video.
The diversity in video is a huge strength, with episodic TV series, movies, talk shows, nonfiction specials, interviews and sports programming, but Google should have made an effort to achieve consitency among pricing. I realize content providers are mostly asses, and the negotiations were probably a huge effort, but maybe Google should have set recommended prices.
Even better, I would have just used a bids-based system, like Google AdWords uses. Except, instead of prices set automatically by top bids, it would be set by views. The prices would all start at $1.99, and rise and fall based on how many people view the video. If the video is unpopular, the system would lower the price a little to see if it improved overall revenue, while if it is popular, it would go up in price, dropping back down if the new price turned off too many buyers. Not only would it make for a fast-adjusting fair market, but it would earn providers the most amount of money, ensure the largest possible audience, and discourage price gouging (which is clearly already happening).
Since Google isn’t doing it already, we can assume it won’t be forcing CBS into a new agreement anytime soon, so we can only hope providers will watch their sales carefully and adjust their prices over time. Don’t count on it though, since most of these guys have been content to let crap sit on Blockbuster shelves, gathering dust until Blockbuster is forced to sell it at a loss.
Getting back to the main point, at current, the Google Video Store isn’t anything special. I wanted to download a show to gauge quality, but I can’t find anything I want. The single NCIS episode in the entire collection is a repeat, and not a very good one.
Worse, the date listed is January 4, 2006, which is presumable when it was uploaded, but not when it originally ran, which can be misleading for fans looking for the latest episode (it almost fooled me). Worse, the show is only available with a Day Pass, meaning you lose it after 24 hours. Not having show descriptions? Huge mistake.
It seems like Google made no effort to require consistency of pricing, completeness of sets, quality of metadata, or anything else. I can’t see why anyone would rely on the Google Video Store for their needs. As long as iTunes and Vongo are doing a better job, you aren’t going to get customers.
Additionally, Google has made little effort at building a usable interface. Google Video is just a search engine, which doesn’t work well as a store. I know Google practically created the church of white space and clean interfaces, but rich content needs something better. I can’t find what I need, view large amounts of content at once, compare options and purchase in bulk for later viewing.
There’s a lot of other criticism out there, so much that linking to it would make this post more ungodly long. One thing we know about Google: It doesn’t bother them if they get it wrong the first time. Hopefully they’ll fix this one faster than they usually do.
Botched. Totally botched.
Whoa, wait…
“Even better, I would have just used a bids-based system, like Google AdWords uses. Except, instead of prices set automatically by top bids, it would be set by views. The prices would all start at $1.99, and rise and fall based on how many people view the video. If the video is unpopular, the system would lower the price a little to see if it improved overall revenue, while if it is popular, it would go up in price, dropping back down if the new price turned off too many buyers. Not only would it make for a fast-adjusting fair market, but it would earn providers the most amount of money, ensure the largest possible audience, and discourage price gouging (which is clearly already happening).”
This isn’t exactly ‘doing no evil’ to users.
Comment by Matt VB | January 11, 2006
Are you saying that a free market with variable pricing based on supply and demand is inherently evil? Would you rather (A) have pricing set arbitrarily to earn the highest possible profit or (B) have uniform price controls that put all content, including bad content, at the same level, forcing you to pay top dollar for bottom products?
Google proved with AdWords that digital products work much better when the market sets the prices, since the seller never knows what the digital product is worth to the user. The same concept should be applied to all digital products, like software and subscription websites.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 11, 2006
I don’t mean to speak for Matt VB on the subject, but maybe he envisions the concept of fluctuating prices as a violation of Google’s “do no evil” policy because of the potential for a popular video to get outrageously expensive. If you buy a video and send it to your friends, it seems unfair for the price to rise as each person buys it.
I think one thing to keep in mind here is the kind of video being sold. This video store has paid content and free content. Sure, if I bought the Numa Numa Dance video from the store for $.99 and the next day the price was $40, I’d say that the fluctuating pricing scheme was unfair. But videos like Numa Numa aren’t the ones that are being sold.
What do you think?
Comment by CJ | January 11, 2006
“Supply and demand?” Last I checked, they have an infinite supply of each video they offer. It would actually make more sense to lower the price of a video as more users download it. (Think about why compaines offer volume discount pricing. Think about why tech products are usually more expensive at first and then go down in price.) Obviously they would need to stop the price before they get to the point where they would be ripping themselves off out of extra money.
Also, how would you feel if someone forwarded a link to a video to you and said “You gotta check this out. It is only a buck.”, only to then see that it is now up to $1.50. I would leave the pricing ideas to people that really know economics.
And like you were saying, their UI for Google Video does leave a lot to be desired. They’ve got way too many programmers that think they also know “design”. They only hire designers that can program. Since people with both “great” design skills and programming skills are probably lying about their proficiency in one of those skills, the end result is what you see in Google Video. Those two skills rarely can coexist in a person since they are a conflict of interest. (A great design means more difficult and time consuming programming.)
Their homepage and maps are their only UIs that deserve props. Everything else (Groups, Talk, Desktop, Answers, Reader, etc.) sucks bad. The company is overrated in terms of design. They are more interested in shoving crap out the door than truly delivering well designed products.
Comment by Chris | January 11, 2006
True, “supply” probably isn’t the best word to use, but the basic idea of supply and demand would apply. Pricing would go up based on maximum revenue. If, as prices increase, sales decrease at a faster rate, revenue drops, and thus, the system compensates by reversing the price increase.
Additionally, the price is periodically lowered, to see if that increases sales to a high enough rate to offset the lower price. In a case where a video is popular enough, the price is more likely to go down, since an affordable, popular video is likely to sell a huge number of downloads, while a higher price would prevent the runaway popularity. The “Numa Numa” video would likely be priced at a quarter, not a dollar or two or forty, since at a quarter, everyone would buy it.
In fact, popular and unpopular content alike would likely see lower prices. Popular content would go down in price to reach enormous audiences, and make huge profits on bulk, while unpopular content would go on sale since that would be the only way to get anyone to buy it.
The only content that would see price increases would be middle-of-the-road high quality content, stuff that not everybody likes, but is professionally produced, like many TV shows and movies. That stuff would be priced based on what the market could bear, with better shows going for a few dollars an episode, while lesser shows might go for under two bucks.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 11, 2006