The mysterious delay has ended and Google Video Marketplace is a reality. To some extent, Google has mashed together user-submitted content with video licensed by major providers such as CBS and the NBA. So, the long-awaited promise to monetize amateur video content is finally realized. At first glance, the prices for this home-grown content are ... well, optimistic, to put it graciously. Unrealistic or inflated, to be harsh about it. A short description and a 30-second clip are the only audition clues you have to decide whether to plunk down ten bucks (to pick a random example) for Segment '76, an 84-minute comedy set in Poland.

Filters enable browsing by provider, paid or free, and long or medium or short. Or "all," in each category.

The big providers have special pages for browsing. CBS is the service's anchor (so far, at least), and I sat straight up in my chair when I saw that Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager are both represented. But only three episodes of each! The hell? Are their digital converters driven by gerbils? What's the freakin' problem? I have no idea where the bottleneck is, but man, I cannot stand meaningless delays. Each one of these series should be converted in its entirety within a day, and should be wholly available. Don't tell me to be patient; I've been patient for 10 years waiting for on-demand entertainment to reach the online space. Lame on CBS; lame on Google; lame on whoever--it's just lame.

CBS is offering three Primetime Shows and seven Classic Shows at this time. Two of the Primteime Shows have one episode each! (Lame.) Survivor: Guatemala is available in 11 episodes, but with gaps in the series. (Lame.) Uniformly, episodes are priced at $1.99.

A bunch of Charlie Rose is available; it looks like randomly scattered episodes originally aired over the last 10 years, priced at 99 cents each. A couple of old Ed Sullivan shows for ... $9.99 each? Is that a  joke? It is not a joke. Hey, look at this--episodes of PBS's Nova, but surprise! They are not episodes; they are clips of less than a minute. What on earth for? Old basketball games are four bucks each. Whatever. Music videos? Five of 'em, for $1.99 each.

Man, this thing is painfully disappointing. I understand now why Google bragged that new content would be added daily; when you start with so little, there's only one direction to move. By the way, where is the video player client that was promised, and that has been removed from Google Pack? No mention of it on the Google Video blog, which, in fact, does not acknowledge Video Marketplace in any way.

Patience, patience, I say to myself. The personalized home page started out pathetically, and it turned into something interesting. You've got to love these Google launches, in a way. The company has a college-student sensibility. It's late to deliver, it throws half-baked stuff into public view, and it continues to work on the assignment after it is due. The end result is usually better than anything else around, but the first iteration of Video Marketplace is almost completely uninteresting and even infuriating. Patience, patience.

I've heard complaints about the software selections in Google Pack. Indeed, the inclusion of RealPlayer is somewhat mystefying and not a little offensive. Others have wondered who will be drawn to Google Pack; new computer users are satisfied with the bundling that comes with the machine, while the more geekish element gets their own software piece by piece. One thing for sure, to whatever extent Pack is downloaded, the important element is the updater. With an automatic software updater purring on machines, Google has a working pipeline through which to introduce new software, or at least promotions of new software.

Curiously, as noted in comment number 15 here, the Google Video player was removed from Google Pack. That doesn't bode well for the Google Video Marketplace, which is missing in action today for the third straight day.

Another curiosity related to the inclusion of RealPlayer: the program is not a default selection on my screen. If I don't click on Add or remove software, I don't even see it. RealPlayer is one of four programs that are opt-in (Trillian, Google Talk and GalleryPlayer are the other three). How were these opt-ins determined? Not from a scan of my hard drive, which contains updated versions of nearly everything in Google Pack, but does not have Gallery Player.

Engadget was added to the very short list of invitees to Google's backstage afterparty, an informal press conference in disguise. Paul Boutin's wrap-up is here. Larry Page remarked that CBS was "courageous" in its deal to distribute content in the upcoming Google Video Marketplace, leading some people to imagine that very light DRM will be attached to the files. We shall see. Although when we shall see is still up in the air.

Whoa, this is beautiful. See it to believe it. A sparkling, animated, granular Google logo that scatters its grains to the wind when you run the mouse cursor through it, then reforms. [via jobeats]

Google Video is meant to be used inline--streamed, not downloaded. But with no playlisting features, one-off streaming is a little retro. Jkinberg at Sandbox Films has written a Firefox extension that rips the videos off the sites and puts them on your hard drive. (Another script is available for downloading YouTube videos.) It's doubtful that this thing will work in the upcoming Google Video Marketplace (if Google ever launches it), and I wonder whether Google will allow this script to continue existing, regardless of the company's friendly relationship with Mozilla and Firefox.

I'm sorry to throw cold water on what I think is a very cool announcement (I'm a big fan of on-demand video content), but where the hell is Google Video marketplace? It is supposed to appear on the Google Video site, which as of this post remains unchanged. This is impossibly lame. Normally, when companies (let's take Apple as an example) announce a new product the damn thing is there. If not, you're just wasting everybody's time--not by announcing it, but by driving millions of people to a site that's not ready. Google's emailed press release remarked that Video Marketplace would be available "soon," which is a bizarrely vague prediction. Now it's the next day--the statute of limitations on "soon" has expired.

Note to Google: You've just taken the wind out of your own sails.

One interesting footnote in Larry Page's keynote yesterday was mention of a development project with Volkswagon that would put Google Earth in cars. I know no details, but it seems to me that if merged with GPS, Google Earth could offer a real breakthrough in car mapping. Operating on the desktop, Earth offers users drive-throughs of driving directions. After an uneven experience testing a Garmin GPS unit in my car, I'd be very interested in an Earth-enhanced device.

According to emailed press releases timed to coincide with Larry Page's CES keynote this afternoon (4pm Pacific U.S. time), Google will satisfy day-old rumors by announcing Google Video Marketplace, and Google Pack.

Video marketplace is (or will be "soon") an expansion of Google Video, incorporating content from CBS, NBA Basketball, and several other first-wave providers. A directory will make content easier to find than the current hunt-and-peck near-random experience of Google Video. The press release indicates, without offering details, that the Video Marketplace stores will be Web-based, as opposed to the client-driven iTunes Music Store. A new software player will also be availalbe, though, that will offer frame-by-frame viewing and other advanced features.

Clearly, Google Video Marketplace is meant to compete with iTMS's video portion, and is inspired by the suddenly growing on-demand video market. CSI and Survivor are two CBS programs that will be offered. The NBA will provide every game on the schedule, including post-season--24 hours after the conclusion of the game. (It'll be interesting to see whether time-sensitive video content sells.) Music videos from Sony BMG. Charlie Rose interviews. Classic cartoons. Promises of new content added daily. Some kind of iPod and PSP compatibility will work. No prices are divulged as of this post.

Google Pack is a bundling of Desktop, Earth, Talk, Toolbar, Picasa, and other non-Google programs including RealPlayer (!), Trillian, Adobe Reader, Firefox, and Adobe Reader. Included is a shell that manages installation, uninstallation, and updating. Very much as Windows does for OS updates. Google Pack isn't exactly an operating system, but it sure wraps a lot of day-to-day functions into an easy package.

Google Pack is for XP only.

Engadget reports that Google officially stomped on the rumor of a Google PC announcement at Larry Page's CES kenote on Friday. (Glad I was right about that one.) Engadget also reports on the replacement rumor: A pay-per-download video store. All right ... it would probably need a client to organize and play back the videos. RealNetworks is said to be involved. That would be most interesting, but I won't sleep tonight dreaming about it. If announced, I'll lose sleep tomorrow playing with it.

Following another hiked projection from financial analyst Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray, and new estimates of the search advertising boom, GOOG is riding high. Rashtchy projected that Google stock will touch $600 before the end of 2006, citing a projection of $33-billion in search industry earnings by 2010 (that would be for the whole industry, not for Google). Kevin Kelleher at TheStreet makes both cases--bullish and bearish--for GOOG in 2006. Yesterday GOOG gapped above $440 and stayed there.

Perhaps I'm the last person on earth to notice this, thanks to my addicted use of Google Toolbar and the built-in Google search in Firefox. It's rare that I need to visit Google.com. But today's logo is one of the coolest yet, celebrating the birthday of Louis Braille, inventor of the raised-dot written language for the blind.

Man, the power of old media. A purely speculative prediction article in the L.A. Times, wondering if Larry Page's CES keynote on Friday might be used to announce a Google PC, was splashed around on the Digg front page as if it were reported fact. The rumor pipeline is red hot. This is not the first time the idea of a Google PC has surfaced and caught everyone's imagination. Perhaps it speaks to the blood lust of Microsoft haters that speculation gets more insistent each time. The only hardware Google has ever produced is the Google Appliance, and enterprise search server. It is hard to imagine any company ramping up mass production of computers out of the blue. If the manufacturing is outsourced, it's difficult to see how it could meet the ultra-low price points being tossed around. the proposed scenario is that Google would distribute its machines through Wal-Mart.

Remember the build-up to Google's announcement with Sun Microsystems? That turned into a pretty wispy deal, and it's hard not to look at the present build-up in that light. Still, I won't be ignoring word of Friday's keynote.

It's a testament to Google's influence in the search field that any mention of banner ads on Google pages is met with widespread fear, curiosity, cynicism, reassurance from the company, and further questioning. the further questioning was recently conducted by Danny Sullivan at SEW, who found Marissa Mayer on vacation and tried to clarify how much wiggle room Google has left itself on the question of banner ads. Mayer affirmed, as she had already in the Unofficial Google blog, that banners on the Google home page (as presented to users not signed in) were out of the question, and any reasonable observer would believe this. Google's trust equity would be damaged by flashing ads on the famously pristine flagship page, and nobody knows that more than Google.

Danny did coax Marissa Mayer to acknowledge that the personalized home page is another story entirely, and that targeted ads (text and banner, presumably), are not out of the question there. Not soon, though, according to Mayer.

Niall Kennedy has documented an API for Google Reader, beating Google to a public release of how developers can build their own feed-reading applications atop Google's engine. An update to Niall's original post reveals that the product manager of Google Reader confirmed the accuracy of Niall's work, and asserted that Google built the API first, then contstructed Google Reader as just one example of what could be done. The implication here is that Google might well develop new feed-reading applications--something to look forward to. Further, Google plans to release an official API before long, opening the doors to third-party applications.

Does Google know about Googlewar.com? (Link is not workplace safe.) It's a public moblog repository used primarily (at the time of this post) as an amateur porn site. Google is not the most aggressive domain plicer in the world, but it might not want its name associated with this thing.