While others have been interpreting the tea-leaves about Google's recent "you can't handle the truth" statement about video, Robert Cringely, ubër-pundit, tells you what it really means:

And the effort began this week with Google stating what I've been hollering for weeks, that the Internet is going to be buried in video. "The Web infrastructure, and even Google's (infrastructure) doesn't scale. It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect," Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.

Cringely thinks Google has a grand plan on video, and attendant advertising. I'm usually skeptical of anything conspiratorial that would require a big company (like Google) to depend on future innovation and make grand plans farther than 1 year out; however, I must admit, I'd put my money on Cringely at this point:

The future lies in watching precisely the video you want to watch precisely when YOU [...] want to watch it. This requires a client-server distribution system for more than just ads and it will come as bandwidth and server capacity increase. I've spent the last three weeks explaining exactly how that will happen. But first Google has to make itself indispensable to European cable companies, to get a toehold in their market. Only when they are totally dependent on Google ad services will the search giant reveal its true video ambitions in Europe.... and the world.

Bandwidth, P2P and video distribution predictions are things Cringley does best.

¶ 2/12/2007