SplashCast to the rescue?
Around the time Google was kicking YouTube’s tires, I wrote up a long, involved post about what I thought of the potential merger. Like most of what I write, it ended up getting a little convoluted and was relegated to the circular file. The general theme of it was that maybe — just maybe — the exhorbanent purchase price being thrown around for YouTube wasn’t complete insanity. I thought Google had something up their sleeve, and I thought I had an idea of what it was…
Well, turns out, Google pretty much just bought into the hype. It’s now in the process of dismantling its homegrown player, Google Video, and turning it into a pure video search engine (where it belonged all along).
But this news came as a bit of a disappointment to me. I had a vision — channels upon channels of aggregated content. Aggregators aggregating aggregators — filters and feeds, RSS and OPML galore, bridging video with audio and text. I thought Google shared my optimistic outlook for the future of television. I was wrong. I thought Google was the only company in the position to bring forth this future. Apparently, wrong again. Looks like another company’s crawled out of the woodwork with a product that just might pull this off. All this coming from a former e-learning software maker, no less?
It could all be too good to be true — after all, the e-learning field’s notoriously big on hype but not exactly a bastion of innovation. Perhaps they changed fields because they got tired of fighting the Blackboard problem?
February 24th, 2007 at 12:00 am
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