14 DAY TRIAL // It's spring cleaning time at Google it seems, the company is bent on getting rid of the things it's not using anymore. While forcing YouTube and Blogger users to upgrade their old accounts is a necessary push, deleting all the videos hosted by Google Videos, without the possibility of migrating them may be harder to swallow for some.
Google sent an email to all users that have uploaded something to Google Video. In it, it announced that all content will become unavailable for playback by the end of the month.
"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," Google told users.
"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," it said.
A good idea too, YouTube is the place to be at this point, it's the largest video website in the world, by a significant margin, and it offers some of the most advanced tools as well.
The problem is, Google isn't offering any way of moving content from Google Videos to YouTube, users have to do it manually.
"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," Google explained.
Having the possibility to retrieve your videos is great, but a much better option would have been to be able to move directly to YouTube. Still, it's very unlikely that you have that many videos that this will be much of a hassle. Since Google has blocked uploads on Google Video two years ago, there aren't that many active users. There are about 2.8 million videos still available though.