We may be seeing some video ads later this week: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060523/ap_on_hi_te/google_video_ads
Two important things:
They will be just flat images that you can click on if you want to see the video, they won’t just start automatically (thank goodness).
They won’t be automatic popups.
I guess we’ll see how this will work out, google just announced it. We may not get any.
I may be incorrect, but I’m pretty sure that these video ads are something the site publisher has to request or allow. Google adsense format options are usually “opt-in,” meaning that the publisher (i.e. the website owner who puts the ads on his/her page) has to go to the site’s account on Google and choose to participate in the program.
No way in hell would they want to surprise site publishers with an ad format like this. Oy, I can just imagine the justifiable brouhaha by website publishers if their usual unobtrusive text adsense banners were suddenly supplemented by video ads that had been slipped into the rotation! The vitriol would echo throughout the blogosphere.
My point being: if we see video ads, it’s only be if the Reader decided to opt-in. Which – as dubious as I am sometimes about the company’s administrative decisions – I can’t see happening, can you?
You’ve just made me reconsider my stance on the pukey smiley.
What are the format options you have to choose from? Is this described somewhere at the google website?
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com 
Will these ads make noise to grab your attention and make you click them? They won’t be animated at all?
If they work as described, I have a hard time seeing what this really brings to the table. As it is now, if I’m interested in an ad, I click on it, and that takes me to a webpage where I see whatever the advertiser wants me to see. That could very easily include a video, if that’s what the advertiser wants. With this proposed new system, if I’m interested in an ad, I click on it, and if the advertiser wants, I see a video. What’s really new, here? Is it just a matter of what window the video plays in?
Yep! I aims to please. Bolding mine:
The format page mentioned in the above quote is at Example text ads - Google AdSense Help. They don’t have the video ads listed yet, which is normal since those are still apparently in beta (i.e. testing) and not fully available yet.
I’m not an unabashed fan, but I do think the flexibility Google offers as a content/advertising provider is one of their strengths. Like I said in the earlier post, Google is unlikely to willingly piss off site publishers who’ve only been expecting text by surprising 'em with a honking huge video banner, even one that requires a click.
All this is to say that Gaudere may have jumped a wee bit quickly on the panic button. A new form of Law, perhaps? 
Gaudere didn’t look all that panicky to me.
If the ads are a single picture instead of a text block, which is what the article describes, then they don’t seem to me to be more intrusive than what we have now, assuming of course that these ads do pop up at the SDMB, which, from what Gaudere says, is not certain.
I certainly hope that the videos don’t load until the image is clicked. That would be the Board’s death knell for dialup users, and be quite a pain in the ass in general, given the Board’s moodiness (which, now that I think about it, has actually been fantastic in recent months; kudos, Jerry).
Actually, I think the subtext is that the Reader opted in.
There is no subtext. I merely noted a news story and wanted to forestall speculation that the board would suddenly start playing videos while you were surfing on your computer. Right now we clearly are not getting any image ads; whether the Reader will choose to do that at some point in the future I honestly do not know.
My connection is dial-up. Text is OK. Graphics slow things down a lot. Video grinds things to a halt.
Guess what my postition is on video ads?
You like them because it allows you time to read a webpage slowly and carefully?