THIS is interesting. Google has made a couple of announcements about their video properties. As you probably know Google owns YouTube. Google has announced that YouTube video content will now become available in Google Video search results.

In that same announcement Google said: “Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.” Which sounds to me that Google Video is moving from being a hosting/uploading/search service (which basically is YouTube) to a crawling service.

Why do this? As I can see it there’s a couple of reasons. First one is that as it was, YouTube and Google Video were very much overlapping services, but YouTube had most of the consumer recognition mojo. Second reason is that Google seems to be getting big time into video. It’s already announced video content on AdSense. And while we’re not seeing announcements that YouTube is going to start integrating advertising into its clips, we’re seeing research speculating what would happen if they DID. (YouTube has to do SOMETHING to monetize that content. Mo’ eyeballs does not equal mo’ money.)

I have a gentle interest in this thinking about the intellectual property issues, what seems to be a renewed hostility towards advertising in content (is it because it’s video-based instead of text-based and therefore less escapable?), and because I’m surprised at how fast video content has become a matter of course online.

But what interests me more is how Google seems to have just skipped audio. There’s no podcast search engine like Yahoo’s podcast search, no transcription option like Podzinger. No iTunes hookup, no music content from the big labels (except in the video search engine.) I wonder why?