As just confirmed by Search Engine Watch, Google has made available the playback video component of its video hosting, delivery and distribution service.

Still in its very early stages the new service promises to give access to both commercial copyrighted video material as well as to a large quantity of new independently produced video content.

To allow you playback of the videos Google requires you to install a small application (less than 1MB) that for now works only on Windows PCs running Internet Explorer or FireFox.

To find video content to view, you simply use the standard Google search interface dedicated to the Google Video Search.

The video clips can be viewed within a standard browser window, and Google is able even to index and play back the videos at the point where the word you have queried is mentioned.

Search Engine Watch reports:

"The video viewer is adapted from the open source VideoLan (VLC) player, a small application that plays the mpeg audio and video formats that Google requires for user submitted videos.

Video clips will begin playing from the point where your search terms are found in the audio portion of the video. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well.

To watch some video programming, you'll have to pay a fee. In most cases, this fee was specified by the content owner, not Google, though Google takes a small portion of the fee to defray its costs.

The exception is if Google's costs are extraordinary—say for a popular, high resolution video. In that case, Google may arbitrarily charge users a fee if you've specified zero as the price for your video or take a larger revenue share of the price to cover some of these costs."

Google Video Search supports the reading and indexing of time-coded video footage, "allowing playback to begin at the point where your search terms are located in clips".

Yesterday evening John Battelle had anticipated the announcement with the following post:

"I've confirmed that Monday Google will launch an in-browser video playback feature based on the open source VLC media player. This is the logical next step for Google's video search and upload function, which began taking uploads from anyone who cared to submit back in April.

Google will not disclose the raw numbers of videos that have been uploaded to date, but the company will make all those which were tagged as "free" available for real time streaming through the VLC player, which Google has modified and will make available for download Monday morning. The company also intends to make its VLC code available to the open source community as part of their Google code project.

The video will be searchable via the meta data provided by the submission process (no, there's no PageRank for video, yet).

Now, before we start discussing how this represents the Death of Comcast/The Networks/Windows Media Player et al, this is not quite that, but it is the start of something big."

And John Battelle has four very interesting arguments to support the why this is something really big. Must-read.

Google Video Viewer will be available for other platforms sometime soon.

Find out more about the Google Video Upload program here.