ultragirl,

I'm going to give away to Google Earth an idea that will make them millions of dollars, responding to the sort of growing market demand that you expressed. After reading, please provide your opinion as a potential user.

PenguinOpus: Think about providing a movie maker service in the free client as a subscription service. People could designate a kml file they have built and via the menu, query Google Earth about the cost of having it made into a movie. This could be done iteratively until everything is satisfactory. Upon commit, the kml and attendant files would be automatically bundled as kmz, sent to a Google Earth Server, rendered as a movie and sent back via software within the client to open on the user's desktop, while charging the user's credit card. Google Earth could provide movies in wmv and quicktime format, with the user choosing compression levels.

I don't know what the price point or cost would be: this is what market research is for, right? And I'll bet Google Earth has excellent market researchers.

This won't hurt sales of the moviemaker module to Pro users, I guarantee. Professionals (and dedicated amateurs) need to have the ability to make many movies in different versions at zero compression, and only on-board software can do that for them.

PenguinOpus: If you see the value in this idea or are investigating something similar already, I'll send you my resume so I can play too. Got to be some value attached to a goose who lays golden eggs.

SMcQ