Google manifests its video efforts in two ways: 1) YouTube, the world's most popular video community, which allows folks the options to upload and view videos as well as use a host of Web 2.0 sharing and community features; and 2) Google Video, a vertical search page that crawls the Web and indexes video from both YouTube and the Web at large. Google Video recently changed its fit and finish to resemble more of an online TV viewing experience, while adding a few bells and whistles such as the ability to sort searches by most blogged or most shared. The changes are fairly subtle and leave Google followers wondering what the company's long-term vision for video will look like. Will it remain a dabbler or follow the big-picture path it took in advertising by acquiring DoubleClick?

Leaving aside the inherent issues surrounding Google's limited approach to video search (such as the lack of speech-to-text search capabilities), the current dual strategy in video is a neither-here-nor-there weakness, but it also could represent Google laying low with a large bombshell in the works. As Google continues to build out businesses that are "repeatable and scalable" (so says Eric Schmidt in the 1Q08 earnings call), the company's emerging cloud business could become a major high-bandwidth video network that offers content providers of all sorts the ability to upload, efficiently broadcast, track and monetize video content. In essence, the cloud would contain a series of video delivery applications and services, some built by Google, some built by third parties. On the surface, this next-gen video strategy might appear to replicate Google's current YouTube brand, which in many ways has been field-testing the viability of this cloud video network concept for the past few years. At some point, however, it would make sense for Google to create two cloud/network offerings: one dedicated to consumer creators (YouTube) and the other for professional creators, each with its own set of applications and liquidity options, not to mention copyright-screening and accounting needs.

One ingredient to accelerate this strategy would be in Google's acquisition of an online video publishing platform provider (see "A Market Overview of Online Video Publishing Platform Providers") to enhance its cloud-based roster of such services as ingestion, transcoding and player customization. Alternatively, Google could stay neutral and just remain the "arms dealer" that provides content owners and application developers the network sandbox in which TV moves to a new level.