An update on Google Video - Finding an easier way to migrate Google Video content to YouTube
Last week we sent an email to Google Video users letting them know we would be ending playbacks of Google Videos on April 29 and providing instructions on how to download videos currently hosted on the platform.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the end of a long wind-down. Google stopped selling paid downloads in 2007 after the YouTube acquisition made its own storefront redundant, then cut off new uploads in January 2009 alongside the shutdown of Notebook, Dodgeball and Jaiku — leaving Google Video as an archive-only service for two years before this week's email announcing that playbacks end on April 29.
The notable part is not the closure but the exit path: rather than telling users to download files themselves, Google built a direct migration route into YouTube. It is a rare case of a company absorbing its own discontinued product's content rather than just deleting it, and it lands while YouTube is mid-expansion on every other front — live streaming launched earlier this month, the Green Parrot Pictures acquisition landed in March, upload volume hit a reported 35 hours per minute, and Next New Networks marked its biggest move yet into professional programming.
First-order effects
- Google Video users have one week — until April 29 — to either download their hosted videos or use the new migration tool to push them onto YouTube accounts, or lose access entirely.
Second-order effects
- YouTube absorbs whatever catalog survives the deadline, adding legacy content to a site already scaling up on live streams, improved processing from Green Parrot Pictures, and professional output via Next New Networks — deepening the single-destination dynamic that killed Google Video's own audience.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across 2007, 2009 and now 2011 shows Google consolidating around winners and shutting down also-rans with increasing speed; if that holds, users face a web where more of their uploaded media lives under fewer roofs, making export-and-migrate tools a recurring expectation at every sunset announcement.
The trend: Google's product portfolio is consolidating toward YouTube as the sole home for consumer video, with each discontinued property folded in or deleted along the way.