Close Google Video
In an email to its registered users, Google has notified it that it will terminate its video service running under its own name. You still have a tight month to download the videos stored there.
Videos will be available to watch on Google Video until April 29, after which only download links will be available: users will be able to save uploaded and managed content to their computers until May 13. It took a little long to make that decision, as YouTube has long since taken the place of Google’s own-name service.
YouTube was owned by Google in 2006, but the two video services ran side by side for a long time. True, YouTube was already much more popular then, and has since become virtually the number one online video provider in the world. Since then, we've finally been able to make YouTube profitable, and another Google service, Picasa, which stores images, has the ability to upload videos.
As early as May 2009, Google Video introduced a restriction that new videos could no longer be uploaded: by this time, everyone was confident that the service, which had become obsolete, would soon be discontinued. In comparison, we had to wait another two years for this step. So the closure itself wasn’t an unexpected move, but many wonder why it wasn’t possible to automatically, or at least much more easily, migrate videos from the old location to YouTube. The email sent to users mentions just one convenience: if someone has uploaded multiple videos to Google Video, they can download them all from a single interface. In comparison, it would have seemed quite clear to offer a feature that would have made it easy to move videos to our YouTube account.
