Google is taking its first steps to go after the huge market for television advertising this week with a new service that will place video commercials on the many Web sites where it sells advertising.

For now, Google isn't placing video advertising on Google.com or the other sites it runs, but it says it is considering doing so in the future.

Advertisers have been eager to buy the relatively limited supply of spaces for online commercials at prices that equal and sometimes exceed the rates charged by major networks, as measured by cost per thousand viewers.

Google's move expands the online advertising space to the network it has established for text and graphical ads--a group of sites whose number it will not disclose, though it is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Google's announcement came a week after AOL said that it had acquired Lighteningcast, a company that sells video advertisements on about 150 sites, including Space.com and Nascar.com. Lighteningcast will be merged with AOL's own Advertising.com unit, which mainly sells banner advertisements on other sites but is also getting into sales of video advertising.

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