Although it was am obvious move that many were surprised didn’t happen sooner, the culling of Google Video is still big news. Will Google Video now evolve into something else? And will Google’s new focus on YouTube mean the site fulfils its obvious potential?
Bound To Happen
When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, two things were clearly marked to happen. The first was YouTube being turned into a profit-making entity, and the second was that Google Video’s time was sure to be up.
Google has for the last year or so been making mammoth efforts to turn YouTube’s potential into the money maker it clearly deserves to be. But until now there has been little happening on the Google Video side of things.
Google Video Dead
Now though, faced with a crumbling worldwide economy that is even affecting the biggest and brightest companies, Google has acted. Google Video is being effectively killed off along with five other seemingly worthless products.
In a series of blog posts this week, Google announced the demise of Google Catalogs, Dodgeball, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebooks, Jaiku, and the application we as an online video site are concerned with, Google Video.
Official Google Video Blog
Google Video has been left to rot since the acquisition of YouTube made it a little pointless. Now the rot has set in, it’s time for Google to start the process of shutting down or modifying the service.
Google announced the cull on the Official Google Video Blog. Amongst some slick language explaining how Google does business, there are a couple of key points.
Google Talks
“In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video. Don’t worry, we’re not removing any content hosted on Google Video — this just means you will no longer be able to upload new content to the service.”
“We’ve always maintained that Google Video’s strength is in the search technology that makes it possible for people to search videos from across the web, regardless of where they may be hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.”
“There are still great options for people who want to upload content to Google, and we invite them to explore YouTube’s dynamic global community or Picasa Web Albums.”
“We’re confident this decision is the right one for our users, and we’re looking forward to making Google Video an even better place for you to search and find videos from all over the web.”
Pointing To The Future
In essence, disabling the ability to upload new content means the site dies. Google is canny in not deleting any videos as it will still make money from them but once a certain transition period is concluded, I suspect this will change.
Google directs users to move over to either YouTube or Picasa, the latter of which has been converted to allow video uploads. With three video options available to its users, one of which is YouTube, the most trafficked site in the world, culling Google Video seems to be an obvious move.
Google Search and YouTube Money
Google clearly now intends to convert Google Video into an all-encompassing, all-singing, all-dancing video search engine covering the whole of the Web. And again, this makes perfect sense when the popularity of online video is paired with Google’s expertise with search engines.
YouTube was already having a lot of care and attention lavished on it, from a new HD option, the change to widescreen, and all those various attempts to better monetize the site. But with Google Video now on its way out of the door, expect YouTube to evolve even more in the next couple of years.
