Have you ever wanted to watch a training video, but didn't feel you could take the time for it? Ever wished a slow speaker would talk just a little faster? Or maybe you'd like to skim through a presentation at high speed until you got to something really interesting?

All that is now possible with Google Video for business. Just select the video you want to watch, and you'll see a speed control in the player. Click the button to switch between 1.5x and real-time, or drag the pop-up slider to select the speed you want. The new speed setting is "sticky"...in other words, you can find particular sections of interest by dragging the position marker or clicking in the Scenes bar without dropping back to normal speed.

We've found that most videos are very comprehensible at 1.25x to 1.75x speed. If your video is captioned, you'll find that you can go even faster.

Give it a try. Once you start watching videos at 1.5x, you might never go back to real-time!

Google Video for business is part of Google Apps Premier and Education Editions, included with Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and more. To learn more about Google Apps, get started here.

Posted by Daniel Steinberg, Google Video team

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In the past week, we've released some cool new features in Google Video for education in Google Apps, including captioning of audio tracks, and ability to upload videos up to 1GB in size for users with Google Gears-enabled browsers. We mentioned that both of these features may be useful for schools, and now we'd like to make them easier to try.

As of March 31st, we will be offering 10GB of Google Video free to every Google Education Edition domain. This will give each school the ability to stream up to 30 hours of content of anything they want - be it 30 hours of Physics 101 lectures, 30 hours of little league soccer practices or 30 hours of commencement keynotes – or a mix of those.

When we originally added Google Video to the Apps suite, we offered it for free for a trial period, but promised a change in our policy this March (right now). And here's that promised change. Now you can store 10GB of video and trade out old video for new, knowing that your current 30 hours is always available on our servers.

So start your video cameras and capture your professors (or your students) in the act; we'll provide the storage; the popcorn's up to you.

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google Apps Education Edition Team

When we first launched Google Video for business in Google Apps, we aimed to apply Google's video technology to solving real business and education problems. Google itself, and Google Apps customers, have been using the product for everything from executive briefings to extending training events to its remote offices to sharing wacky office moments with coworkers. In fact, we've been using Google Video to save both time and money at Google, making most video production a self-serve process.

Since we launched Google Video back in September 2008, we've been listening to customers and working hard to make Google Video even better. Today, we're excited to announce two major new features are available right now on your domain:

• Captions We've added a new captioning feature which allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding of your video. Captions can help people who would not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who speak other languages or who are deaf or hearing impaired. You'll find details and administrative information here.
  

• Larger Uploads Starting today, users with Google Gears configured in their browser can upload videos of up to 1 GB in size, up from the 300 MB limit previously available. This is important to businesses and schools that need to host longer form or higher quality video. If you'd like to upload videos of this size, simply get Google Gears or Google Chrome to enable larger uploads today.

Check out these new features, and please keep the suggestions coming.

Posted by Vinay Siddavanahalli and Jared King, Google Video Team