Google Video for Businesses

Google has added video-sharing to Google Apps Premier, a suite of online productivity and management tools that directly target Microsoft Office marketshare.

To give users a sense of how Google itself uses video internally, the Googleblog — which released the news — posted the following video demonstration:

Unlike Google Apps Standard and Google Apps for Education, which are free, Google Apps Premier costs $50 per user per year. The price will remain the same, even with the video-sharing feature.

The service, dubbed Google Video for Businesses, will operate on the same infrastructure as YouTube. It will also share YouTube's means of flagging copyright and inappropriate content. All videos will be hosted on the Google server.

Apps Premier users get three gigabytes of storage each. Admins can edit or remove clips, generate reports or build tag taxonomies.

Product Management Director Matthew Glotzbach of Google Enterprise believes video-sharing in Apps Premier will change how people collaborate at work, The New York Times reports, observing that the average cost of building and maintaining a proprietary video upload-and-sharing system is beyond the budgets of most businesses.

From September 8, 2008 to March 9, 2009, Apps for Education will also include video capabilities on a trial basis. Beyond that, it will cost $10 per user per year.