In an interview, Marissa Mayer admitted that YouTube's embedded player is a very valuable asset and makes YouTube a distribution platform. YouTube became so popular that many people who want to post a video online or share it with their friend go to YouTube and upload the video. This way, almost any important video from the recent years can be found on YouTube. Because of its omnipresence, the YouTube player is a great vehicle for advertising and Google intends to use it: YouTube introduced overlayed video ads for some content partners, an AdSense-enabled YouTube player, but the new video identification technology launched this week will allow them to extend the monetization to the rest of the videos.
Here are two screenshots of the updated player, followed by a discussion with Sergey Brin and Larry Page from the Google Zeitgeist 2007 conference.
{ via Googlified }