No Google Video in China

It’s bad enough that I can’t get Wikipedia here in mainland China. The other day I went to view a Google Tech Talk and got the following message:

Thanks for your interest in Google Video.

Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.

We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience.

Lovely. Even Apple iTunes allows me to purchase music from my account here, but no Google Video. So I did what I had to do and ssh’ed into a server back in the states and used lynx) to get to the video webpage. From there I could download a version for the iPod and I could then take that MP4 file and put it somewhere I could download back to a computer here. I’m going to have to write a server side script that does all of this for me. Oh well.