Google Video is finally being put out of its misery, over two years after Google effectively decided to kill its own baby to let its adopted child YouTube to blossom.
Google Video Killed Off
It was really no surprise to anyone when, in January 2009, Google announced it was killing Google Video. This came almost three years after the search giant had acquired YouTube for a tasty $1.65 billion, and it didn’t really make sense to keep them both going.
Google Video was just one of the sites and services which were culled at the time, with Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebooks, and Jaiku also shuttered.
A few months later and the ability to upload videos to the site ended, but existing content remained on the site. Until now.
Content Now Disappearing
Google has sent out an email to registered Google Video users informing them that all content is now being removed. On April 29 the ability to view videos on the site will end, and on May 13 the ability to download them will also end. Effectively killing the site once and for all.
“Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re removing the remaining hosted content.
We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.
On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)
We encourage you to move to your content to YouTube if you haven’t done so already. YouTube offers many video hosting options including the ability to share your videos privately or in an unlisted manner.
This actually flies in the face of the advice Google was giving on its help pages, which insisted that although uploads were being disable, content “would remain hosted by Google Video”. But then nothing lasts forever, and users have had plenty of time to migrate their content over to an alternative site.
Google naturally now hopes those users will migrate themselves and their content over to YouTube, if they haven’t already done so.
Conclusions
An unsurprising move that was always bound to happen at some point, even if Google didn’t quite know when until the decision was made. If YouTube provided a terrible user experience then this would be a problem, but the opposite is true. Which means few people are likely to complain.
[Via CenterNetworks]
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