Google has updated its help documents to explain that now it has limited which video providers can show up with the key moments interface in Google Search. It is available for all YouTube videos based on just adding a video description and now a "small set" of video providers at this time.
Update: Danny Sullivan said this was changed not to reduce access to this feature to just YouTube but rather open it up to more. Danny said "we're now moving to make this available generally, when relevant, regardless of video source." He said "No specific timeframe on launch or guarantee, but I would expect it to be in weeks rather than months." More details below, so I'll have another story later when this opens up more but for now, this was mostly just a technical docs change.
Google wrote that if your video is hosted on your web page, you can add Clip structured data to your VideoObject to help Google understand the important points in your video. But now "this feature is currently limited to a small set of providers." And Google is currently "not accepting new providers at this time."
Google began rolling out this video interface in October 2019 and then has made numerous changes to the key moments interface since. But now, Google is limiting which video providers can benefit from this enhanced and richer results interface.
Lizzi Harvey from Google, who updates a lot of these types of help documents answered some questions for me around this:
I think this should clarify. Google tries to automatically enable key moments without you having to do anything extra, but there are ways to help Google understand which points specifically should be used (through markup or in the YouTube description) pic.twitter.com/PUrBwyiDzC
— Lizzi Harvey (@LizziHarvey) March 30, 2021
The docs for Clip markup are still live; anyone can implement that markup if they want to (you just might not see any effect in search, since it's still a limited thing).
— Lizzi Harvey (@LizziHarvey) March 30, 2021
So it seems that if you implement the Clip markup, you likely won't show up in search anyway.
But YouTube videos by simply adding content to the video description shows up.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update: A bit more details on what to expect here from Google in the near future:
FYI, here's an example of it working for video from a non-YouTube source. pic.twitter.com/MFbpFcqGlC
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 31, 2021
Update 2: Google added a more detailed clarification of all of this on this page, here is a copy:
