Google Wants TV Show Owners To Start Tagging Video

Google is encouraging TV show owners/providers to begin tagging their online videos with several new fields that can be used in both video sitemaps and mRSS feeds.

The new fields include specific data for identifying the show/series title, season and episode numbers, premiere date and more. Google’s blog post explains and shows the correct code in more detail.

Interestingly, that blog post also begins by saying the new fields should be used “if your website is the authoritative source for the video of a particular TV show.” But there’s nothing stopping other sites that post unofficial TV show episodes from also using the code.

Google has been under fire recently from critics who say that it doesn’t do enough to deter piracy in its search results. This was the subject of a recent US congressional hearing, and Google also recently took action to drop piracy-related terms as suggestions. The stories below have more:

• Could The US Demand That Google Boost Hollywood Sites To Fight Online Piracy?
• Google Removes Piracy-Related Terms From Instant Search

Today’s move also seems similar to what Google News did a few months ago when it offered new meta tags to help identify the original sources of online content.