Google Won't Delete Content, Offers YouTube Migration Tool for Its 'Video' Site

The death of Google Video, at least as a video host, has been postponed after public outcry. Last week, Google announced that all videos still available on the site will be deleted at the end of this month. Unsurprisingly, most people didn't take the news very well and it seems that there are still plenty that care about the video site.

So Google is backing down and has dropped the time limit, it will not be deleting videos for the foreseeable future.

The company also addressed the second biggest concern, the lack of an easy way of transferring content to YouTube, with a dedicated and automated migration tool.

"Google Video users can rest assured that they won't be losing any of their content and we are eliminating the April 29 deadline. We will be working to automatically migrate your Google Videos to YouTube," Mark Dochtermann, engineering manager at Google, announced.

"In the meantime, your videos hosted on Google Video will remain accessible on the web and existing links to Google Videos will remain accessible," he reassured users.

Granted, Google Videos wasn't the most popular service, even in its heyday, which is why the company acquired YouTube in the first place.

Google later disabled uploads to the service and has positioned it as a video search engine rather than host.

Since it's been two years since anyone has uploaded a video to the site, the team decided to delete all of them and offered users the possibility of downloading their videos until April 29.

What it didn't do though was offer a tool to transfer videos from the site to YouTube which seems like a rather obvious move. Google has fixed this now, but it should have probably made a migration option available from the get-go.

"We’ve created an 'Upload Videos to YouTube' option on the Google Video status page. To do this, you’ll need to have a YouTube account associated with your Google Video account," Google explained.