Google has recently added a feature enabling websites to embed videos from the Google Video site. The feature is available for certain free videos.

The embedded video appears as a player with controls, displaying an early frame in the video. I found a handful of college promotional videos on the site, but so far only one that has the “Put on site” feature enabled–a promotional video for Multnomah Bible College, which I embed below as an example.

I was surprised not to find more college promotional videos in the Google Video search. I was also surprised that many of the ones I did find didn’t have the “Put on site” feature enabled. This seems like a great way to encourage the distribution not only of promotional videos, but also classroom videos and screencasts. TILT (Teachers Improving Learning with Technology) has already picked up on the idea, and is embedding videos it uploads to Google back on its own blog (cool idea!).

It would be great to see someone begin to include the code for embedding these videos in an RSS feed (perhaps someone with a classroom video or screencast), as a way to begin syndicating embedded video. Perhaps, in the future, Google will offer an easy way to make this happen, possibly by offering publishers a way to syndicate what they publish on Google Video.

If the feature is enabled for a given video (see, for example, this video), you will see a “Put on site” link on the page for the video itself. Clicking the link reveals a window containing HTML code for embedding the video on your site, which you copy into the page where you want to embed a video.

(Disclosure: Multnomah Bible College admission office is a client of Thomson Peterson’s.)

Technorati tags: Google Video, Multnomah