Google tweaked its end game procedure for closing Google Videos, removing the deadline and providing instruction for how users may migrate video to YouTube.
Google last week emailed users of Google Video — the service users chiefly used to upload videos on Google’s infrastructure before the company’s $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube — that it would be shuttering the service for good April 29.
The search engine provided instructions for how users could move their content to YouTube, giving them until May 13 to do so.
The Google Video closure shouldn’t have come as a shock to anyone. Google revealed it would be silencing the service in January 2009 as part of a mass execution of extraneous Web services, including Google Notebook, Jaiku, Google Catalogs and others.
The company vowed to let users play back existing videos for awhile, but did not provide an easy path to let Google Video users shuttle their content to YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube popularity surged to the point that 35 hours of video are uploaded there every minute.
More than two years later, Google is ready to close the book on Google Videos and focus its servers on YouTube, which the company is looking to build into a massive broadcast platform to compete with TV networks and cable providers.
There are more than 3 million videos on Google Videos, so it’s no surprise users pushed back against Google closing the service the way it chose to close it.
To assuage the change, Google promised Google Video users won’t lose their content and to work to automatically migrate Google Videos to YouTube.
“In the meantime, your videos hosted on Google Video will remain accessible on the Web and existing links to Google Videos will remain accessible,” said Mark Dochtermann, Google engineering manager.
Those who want to shuttle videos to YouTube must have a YouTube account associated with their Google Video account, then click the Upload Videos to YouTube button on the Google Video status page.
Users may also still download their videos from Google Video.