Even in the announcement, it's about "legitimate, quality sources". Legitimate comes first, it is there combined with quality, but in reality it isn't. The best videohosters out there aren't legitimate in the eyes of the copyright-holders.
How high quality is the linked and praised npr.org, which incorporates Youtube-Videos which arent playable "from some websites", including npr.org [1] (from my ip at least)?
I don't have the data. I can't have. But according to the argumentation of the announcement itself and my own judgement regarding the sites in question, this is not a "search quality change" with a high bar to meet, done by engineers wanting to improve the results. I bet this comes from lawyers, (internal?) politics or pressure from the copyright-industry.
that list does correlate rather well with spammy content (stuffed links and lots of flash ads and popups), it just also happens to correlate well with sites you're looking for when you want a torrent. As long as they're still indexing these sites, they're probably still going to come up if you add "torrent" to your query, so I don't really see the problem.
The reality is, when most people are looking for a video, they are looking to find it on an official site, and not a streaming video site from china or a torrent site with 18 "download" buttons, none of which links to the actual torrent file download (it's in the plain text link). As long as they can still find the other content, you're still meeting everyone's needs and you've probably upped average searcher satisfaction.
Now, geographic restrictions on video playback would be a great search signal to incorporate (would googlebot start trying to play videostreams, though?). That shit is really annoying.
How high quality is the linked and praised npr.org, which incorporates Youtube-Videos which arent playable "from some websites", including npr.org [1] (from my ip at least)?
I don't have the data. I can't have. But according to the argumentation of the announcement itself and my own judgement regarding the sites in question, this is not a "search quality change" with a high bar to meet, done by engineers wanting to improve the results. I bet this comes from lawyers, (internal?) politics or pressure from the copyright-industry.
[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/08/09/158525288/muse...