Shadows In Motion

Google has made a couple of major announcements, and I’m sure that more information about all of this will be coming soon.

First, Google will be offering a service to watch or download prime time television shows and similar offerings.  At the time of this posting it’s uncertain if you will download the video to your hard drive or if it will be restricted to streaming video.  Considering Google’s current video service I would not be surprised if it’s limited to streaming, but on the other hand, who’s going to pay for something that they don’t actually own?

If it’s restricted to streaming then it would be better to call it a rental service rather than saying that it sells the video.  We’ll just have to wait and see how this turns out!

In other news Google has also announced a software bundle.  I could list the software manually but it’s a lot easier to quote:

In related news Google will also take the wraps off of “Google Pack,” a bundle of applications that will be made available for download in a single installation bundle. Sources tell us that Google pack will feature a Google-tweaked version of Firefox, Adobe Acrobat Reader, antivirus software from Symantec, AdAware, Trillian, and Google’s own offerings, including Google Desktop Search, Picasa, Google Earth, Google Talk, and all of the toolbar action you can shake a stick at. Oh, and I left out one other item: the RealPlayer.

Personally, I’m rather taken aback by the contents of this bundle.  There’s an awful lot of bloat and otherwise questionable software listed there.  This bundle won’t ever touch my hard drive.

What are your thoughts?

You can read more about this, including forth coming updates I’m sure, at arstechnica.com (link goes directly to the article), and you can read others’ opinions of this in this digg.com post.

~Mysk

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