San Francisco — Google is hoping that nowadays video sharing is not just for entertainment anymore. Today, Google Inc. announced the launce of a YouTube-like video communications features to its business application suite, hoping to make video-sharing among office workers as easy as trading e-mails or instant messages.
The search colossus, which has been wildly hunting — in vain — for ways to monetize its YouTube acquisition, may sense an opportunity here. With “Google Video for Business,” video sharing becomes a serious business tool.
Unlike YouTube, which is directed at consumers, Google’s latest release, Google Video for Business, the free add-on to Google Apps is designed to be distributed among designated users within an organization’s own Web domain, which enables selected employees to upload a video — say a training video, a corporate speech or announcement or highlights of a sales conference or other employee video messages from unauthorized disclosure outside the company — and then invite colleagues to view it securely.
Employees can also comment on videos, add descriptions and tags; embed videos in internal Web pages, search for any video to which they have access or download videos to their laptops or phones.
In a traditional cloud computing style, as part of its package of online software that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets, the latest offering, Google Video for Business, can be accessed through most browsers including Safari on the iPhone.
YouTube helped jump-start the online video craze with consumers. Corporate parent Google Inc. is banking that the service takes off with companies that might have been put off using video by the costs involved.
According to the web giant, the video service could find itself being used in companies for sharing company news – “email does not always carry a lot of feeling, it is not always the best means of communication,” a Google spokesman said in a statement.
Dave Girouard, the company’s president of enterprise, in a statement said that “YouTube has enabled millions of consumers to easily capture and share video at an unprecedented level, yet corporate video have remained expensive and complicated.”
Girouard described the benefits of the new offering, claiming that the new service reinforces the ties between the company’s business and entertainment services. “With Google Video for business, our customers get the ease of YouTube combined with the simple and secure sharing of Google Apps.”
Google Video for business is being incorporated into the Internet search leader’s “Google Apps Premier Edition,” which costs $50 a user for year for a package of business software, e-mail, scheduling and, Web site design capabilities.
“What YouTube did in the consumer world, Google Video for business is going to do in the enterprise,” said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google’s Enterprise division, the unit responsible for Google Apps.
From September 8, educational users of Google Apps can try out the service free for six months and will be charged $10 a user to continue using video thereafter.
One Google executive said during the demo that instead of distributing an e-mail with a wrap-up of quarterly results to his team, he posted a clip of himself discussing the quarter. It was more personable than just sending an e-mail “especially for Google employees that work in remote offices” the video’s narrator said.
The most tempting feature by far is the “Scene Browser,” which presents a series of thumbnails that a user can click on to locate a specific segment within a video. It is slick and one has to wonder why it is not offered on YouTube. Glotzbach said he did not know for certain but speculated that it might be because YouTube’s clips are generally shorter in length.
Some of the other attributes of the service enables administrators to track usage, and employees can leave comments, insert tags, and embed a video into any Web page.
It is another barrage in a battle between the tech titans, which has heated up with Google’s marketing of online software to compete with Microsoft’s lucrative Office business. Microsoft, meanwhile, has spent billions and tried to buy Yahoo to compete with Google in search and advertising. And the companies also battle over online maps, cellphones and, yes, video.
Microsoft is fighting back by throwing lots of money and talent to make more of its software available as a Web service. The test for Google: Can it move beyond search into online software for enterprises, a space dubbed Enterprise 2.0?