Google is trying to so something about its desperately awful Google Video service, and the latest attempt is sponsored videos. In a limited trial, clips that you wouldn't pay $4.95 to watch, unless you were billions of neurons short of a brain, are now available free. Something that might keep you amused for few minutes if you happened to catch it on a tenth-rate satellite or cable channel -- perhaps an old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon -- has also been reduced from $1.99 to sponsored-free.
John Battelle's Searchblog has a brief account of how it will work. Basically, advertisers will bid in an auction to sponsor the various videos, and they can "run a 15-30 second post-roll video ad".
Sponsored video is certainly an advance, but really it doesn't go far enough. OK, I no longer have to pay $4.95 to watch 56 minutes and 22 seconds of Wrestling Titans: Steve Austin*, thanks to Burger King, but they should be paying me. I don't have a standard rate for consuming either junk food or junk video, but Google would certainly have to pay me more than $495 per hour. And at that price, I'd want to be able to read a book at the same time.
* Misleading title? He doesn't wrestle Atlas, Prometheus or even Epimetheus, which might be worth watching.
