In a surprising turn of events, Google today announced that they have eliminated both deadlines based on user feedback. I’d love to say that the decision had something to do with my recent article Why You Need To Protect Your Data In The Cloud, but that’s wishful thinking. Still, the arguments brought forth in the article are likely similar.

So, Google Video is not shutting down right now. The April 29 deadline is eliminated which means that you can continue using the service as a visitor after that date.

That said, it is still Google’s plan to close down Google Video, but they want to provide their users with a better migration experience.

One thing that I did not understand back then was that they did not offer a way to move your uploaded videos to your Youtube account. It is likely that many Google Video uploaders have Youtube accounts as well.

Google has added an Upload Videos to Youtube option on the Google Video status page which can be used to upload all videos to Youtube. This works if you have both a Google Video and Youtube account. Users without a Youtube account need to create one before they can migrate the videos to Youtube.

The option to upload videos to Youtube should have been there in the first place. It is great to see that Google realized that and added the option to Google Video.

Google Video will still close down eventually, but users now have more options and time to preserve videos either by downloading them to the local system or uploading them directly to Youtube. (via Youtube Blog)

Back to Google Video. The service was not closed down immediately after the Youtube purchase, but it was clearly put on the backseat both in advertising and development efforts. Uploads were disabled in 2009 but hosted videos continued to be served.

This is going to change in the near future. Users of Google Video, that is users who have uploaded videos to the service, have received emails in the past week that informed them about the shutdown of the service on May 13. The first part of it is pasted below.

Dear Google Video User,

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. We’ve always maintained that the strength of Google Video is its ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide.

On April 29, 2011, videos that have been uploaded to Google Video will no longer be available for playback. 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. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011.)

For the next two weeks or so, you are able to play videos on Google Video just as usual. This data is for instance important to webmasters who have embedded Google Video contents on their sites. After April 29, those videos won’t play anymore. Then, two weeks later, the whole service will shut down.

Google Video users who have uploaded videos to the video hosting service can download those videos from their Video Status page.

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. To learn more go here.

Here’s how to download your videos:

Go to the Video Status page.
To download a video to your computer, click the Download Video link located on the right side of each of your videos in the Actions column.

Once a video has been downloaded, “Already Downloaded” will appear next to the Download Video link.

If you have many videos on Google Video, you may need to use the paging controls located on the bottom right of the page to access them all.

Please note: This download option will be available through May 13, 2011.

Thank you for being a Google Video user.

Sincerely,

The Google Video Team

Google obviously recommends Youtube, as it is their second video hosting service, the one they bought after finding out that Google Video was not the Internet user’s favorite service. You could naturally upload the videos to Youtube, which on the other hand raises the question if you should do that, or look for a more reliable hosting solution. While it is unlikely that Youtube will be closed down in the near future, users would probably have said the very same thing about Google Video.

Alternatives are popular video hosting sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo, MetaCafe or Photobucket.

Video uploaders can download their videos via the Video Status page. But what about webmasters who have embedded those videos on their websites and blogs? They need a third party solution to download this videos, or they could try and find the same or a similar video on other video hosting sites.

One of the easiest options to download those videos is to use the Firefox extension Download Helper.

Keep in mind that you have less than 14 days left to download the videos that you have not uploaded from Google Video. Video owners have two additional weeks to download their videos from the video hosting service.

The limitations of the movie rentals at Youtube make it likely that this is a live test of the technology used to provide those video rentals with the likelihood that the service will be expanded and optimized later this year.

But it is not just the limited amount of movies that are offered for rental that are worrying Youtube users. More pressing than that is the fact that only US users will be able to rent those movies for a – premium – of $3.99 per movie providing that they have access to a Google Checkout account.

There is also chatter in the blogosphere that Google has plans to extend the movie rental plans to live TV plans as well so that users – we again assume that there will be country restrictions – can watch live events, including live sports events, on Youtube after paying for that event with the possibility that subscription based plans are introduced as well.

It is not clear yet how the movie rentals are protected from being watched by Youtube users who have not paid for them. It is likely that Google will require users to have a Youtube account that the rented movies will be linked to.

It remains to be seen if other forms of protection – read DRM – will be implemented by Google to protect the movies from being downloaded. Google will make another announcement tomorrow that will contain more details about the Youtube movie rentals process.

The current maximum resolution for Youtube videos is 720p (1280 × 720) which will be raised to the new maximum of 1080p (1920×1080) from next week on. The highest quality level of the video still depends on the video source according to the post at the Youtube blog.

A test video was uploaded to Youtube to showcase the new maximum resolution. This video cannot be embedded and interested users need to visit Youtube to view the video there.

Videos that have already been uploaded in 1080p have previously been encoded for 720p. These videos will automatically be encoded again so that they can be shown in 1080p from next week on at the video portal. A search for 1080p on Youtube reveals many videos that are already available in that new format (or have been improperly tagged with the 1080p tag).

Microsoft backpedaled quickly after it became apparent that the public was not that pleased with their decision and decided to keep the servers up and running for another three year period. The huge problem that arises when DRM servers are taken off the Internet is that the verification process will fail which means that users who want to move the music from an old to a new computer – where they had to verify the music again – would realize that they could not do so because of the server being offline.

Yahoo apparently did not pay attention to the media fiasco and decided to close the Yahoo! Music Store and take the DRM servers offline on September 30, 2008.

Yahoo is giving users of their music service the advise to burn the tracks to CD and rip those tracks on the new computer so that they would be able to listen to the music on a new computer as well.

If you needed another reason why DRM is bad then you got it. And it’s not that some small companies decided to turn off their servers, it’s two huge global corporations that decided to do it. (And Google did it as well before with Google Video)

Bandwidth and server costs accumulated to more than a million Dollars each month. As I said earlier the service was highly popular because of the great video quality which exceeded that of most other portals.

Tulluis informed me just a minute ago that a Stage 6 Clone was announced that would open its gate on April 29th. The homepage of the new service is Divxit and there is unfortunately not a lot to discover right now. Servers and GUI seem to be online already and the Divxit Core converter nears completion which seems to be the last step before the portal goes live.

It would be really nice to see a comeback of Stage 6. A service like that needs either a very potent company in the background or find a way to monetize the website properly so that it does not have to be closed soon after release. Monetization of video portals is not easy because companies know that the click through rates are horrible.

The process itself is explained in a few words. The user enters a search phrase, selects between all or a single video portal and defines the amount of results that he wants returned. A test with 10000 search results was successful, it`s probably safe to say that you can even use a higher figure than that safely.

All results are displayed in the main pane with information like name, video description, duration, age and views. If the user clicks on a video he gets to see a preview of it in the left sidebar with the option to play and download that single video. Multiple videos can be checked and downloaded together as well which is where the strength of the application lies.

Hitting the download button after checking multiple videos will download those videos from the video portal they are hosted at. The output format can be selected as well which I recommend to do before you start download videos. The option is available under the Tube Downloader tab. Several predefined formats can be selected such as iPhone, PSP, iPod, Avi or no conversion.

It is also possible to select custom settings which enables selection of the audio and video codec, output size and bitrate among other settings.

The Free FLV Converter offers a second way of displaying search results. Instead of listing them by name and other details you can generate a thumbnail view which is extremely comfortable if you like preview pictures of the videos.

I have to admit that this is one – if not the – most comfortable way to download multiple videos from a variety of video sites. That in combination with simultaneous downloads and automatic conversions make this an invaluable tool for everyone who downloads videos regularly.

One sector that was a bit neglected until now was documentaries. Best Online Documentaries is a website that tries to change that. They offer nearly 650 documentaries embedded in their website that are hosted on servers like Google Video or Youtube. Viewers can watch the documentaries online on their website.

Several categories like Biographies, History, Science and Mystery and numerous subcategories make it easy to find what you are interested in. All the videos that I tested worked and have a playing time of 40+ minutes. The language is English. Below is one of the videos that you can find on the website. You could really spend several days there.

Loom TV steps in and increases the Youtube and Google Video experience. They offer a standalone client that is able to search both video portals for keywords or predefined channels like Metal and Soccer. The software works in full screen mode, which reminds me a little bit of Joost, as well as in windowed mode.

All videos can be zoomed and stretched from a barely visible video to full screen, have a general quality setting and an option to adjust brightness for instance in real time.

Videos can be added to your channels with easy and they will remain there forever unless they are deleted at Youtube or Google Video. Besides offering ways to view Youtube videos more comfortably Loom TV also offers a way to listen to Internet Radio and read News. Some of the so called plugins can be combined.

It is for instance possible to view videos and read the latest news in a ticker at the same time. The topics are chosen by the user of course.

Users need to signup at the Loom TV website to be able to download the client. The login information is used to login into the client at every startup.

Read More:

Loom TV

This is however not the case. All videos will no longer play after the termination of the service which can be used as a major argument against DRM services. Google – wisely – decided to compensate users by refunding each and everyone

The money will be refunded into a Google Checkout account and expires after 60 days. What this means is that the users who bought videos from Google Video have 60 days to purchase items that they probably do not need from merchants who use Google Checkout. Hardly a fair deal for the consumer if you ask me.

The steps that Google is undertaking to close down their Video service is clearly showing why DRM is not consumer friendly. If the company that sold you items with DRM goes broke, out of business or decides to terminate the service you will realize that your purchased items do not play anymore – and yes, this is also the case with Apple and the songs that they sell that contain DRM.

If you are lucky you get a full refund, if not you might get something that looks like a refund but is basically pushing a different service which is in this case Google Checkout. And if you are out of luck you might not get compensated at all. Does not feel nice to pay a lot of money for items only to find out that you can’t play them anymore on your system, doesn’t it ?

No one would purchase an item in real life that could stop working if the company selling you the item got broke or quit producing the item but this is exactly what is happening right now.

Google sold you videos, made a strategic decision to terminate their service and decided to push the Google Checkout service by tying the refunds to it.

I think it is helpful that consumers now see and hopefully realize that drm media purchased from “big” companies are not guaranteed to work a lifetime which should hopefully push the masses away from DRM.

Vdownloader is a little freeware program that scans your clipboard for links to youtube, google video, grinvi and dailymotion. Once it detects such a link the movie will be automatically downloaded and converted to the format that you specified in the settings. You may save the video as avi, mpg or psp and change the output size and audio bitrate in the process.

Converting youtube videos did not take long at all. A 2 minute video was downloaded and converted in about 2-3 minutes to mpg. I was trying the same on dailymotion and it was working fluent as well. It takes a little bit longer to convert larger videos of course but it still the fastest way that I know of. It is basically a one click download and conversion program.

The Riva FLV Encoder helps us to convert the downloaded flv files into avi, mpg, quicktime or wmv files. All you need to do is add a local input file (flv in this case) and select an output format by adding the extension to the file. If you want an avi file you simply name it video.avi in the form destination video file.

You may change additional parameters like movie size, bitrate, framerate and audio if you like. Please note that the results will not be good if you choose to increase the movie size for instance. Hitting Encode will start the process. Once that is finished you may preview the result and try again if you do not like the result.

To search a special category you use the “genre:” command. If you would like to search for the keyword fun only in the comedy category you would type in fun genre:comedy in the search box. The following paragraph lists all 38 category names of Google Video.

1. Educational
2. Instructional
3. Stock Footage
4. Comedy
5. Mature Adult
6. Science and Technology
7. Ads and Promotions
8. News
9. Animation
10. Sports
11. Home Video
12. Documentary
13. Business
14. Dance
15. Drama
16. Foreign
17. Gaming
18. Horror
19. Movie trailer
20. Nature
21. Political
22. Religious
23. Romance
24. Special Interest
25. Thriller
26. Travel
27. TV Show
28. Western
29. Movie Short
30. Movie Feature
31. Faith and Spirituality
32. Gay and Lesbian
33. Science Fiction & Fantasy
34. Action and Adventure
35. Children and Family
36. Art and Expiremental
37. Health And Fitness
38. Independent

Thanks to jimmyr for finding this out.

Update: Google Video has been discontinued. Google has purchased the online video hosting website YouTube in the meantime and decided to move away from Google Video completely.

YouTube is currently the most popular video portal on the Internet, with more videos uploaded in the hour that users can watch in a lifetime. The video site is not offering a top 100 list (no Youtube top 100) but a trends page. Users can view video trends for specific countries, ages and even gender here. Ever wanted to find out what the most popular videos in Sweden were? Now you can find that out.

A click on a video launches it on the same page. That’s not really handy if you want to watch multiple top or trendy videos. You can either double-click on a video to launch it in a new tab or right-click it and select to open it in a new tab.

One interesting option is the ability to compare video trends between countries, age ranges in a country or genders. Ever wanted to see if men and women watch the same types of videos on YouTube or something completely different? The comparison gives you the data that you need.

Enter Google Video Downloader. This online script does the following. If you find a video at video.google.com that you would like to download all you need to do is copy the url the video is located and paste it into a text field called Decode Url on their site.

A script automatically converts the url and displays the download link and the watch it link. If you click download you can download the film to your computer. Please note that the movies are in flv format, so you will need a movie player that is capable of playing those files. They provide a link to one on the results page.

Head over to Google Video and take a look if this concept sounds interesting to you.

Update: Google since then has retired their own video service after purchasing and heavily promoting YouTube. The video hosting site since then has become the most popular, and lots of video downloaders have been published since then. Here is a short selection of tools that we have reviewed in the past:

Google Chrome Youtube Video Downloader – A video downloader for the Chrome web browser that is integrating the download capabilities right into the browser window.

Bulk Youtube Video Downloader For Firefox – A similar program for the Firefox browser that you can use to download multiple videos at once.

You can also check out our YouTube video downloader overview that lists dozens of web browser extensions and desktop applications to download YouTube videos.

It’s an experiment we want to run, said Page of the video-uploading service, which he said the company will formally announce in the next few days. Page made the non-announcement announcement during Monday’s opening panel discussion at the National Cable & Telecommunications Show here, upstaging his luminary fellow panelists John Chambers of Cisco, Brian Roberts of Comcast, Jon Miller of AOL and Jeffrey Katzenberg of Dreamworks.

Update: The home video uploads that Google has been testing back in 2005 turned into a service called Google Video. In 2011, Google announced plans to retire Google Video in favor of YouTube, another video hosting service that the company bought in November 2006 for $1.35 billion US Dollars.

It was clear that the time would eventually come when Google would retire one of the two video hosting services, and the popularity of YouTube made the decision easier than one may have expected.

Google is currently offering Google Video users options to transfer their uploaded videos to YouTube so that they are preserved on the Internet, and that users of Google Video keep their videos online with minimal efforts on their part.

The process of transferring videos to YouTube is not automated though, and Google Video users need to log into their account on the site to initiate the transfer of the videos to their YouTube account. They can transfer the videos to an existing YouTube account that they have access to, or a new account in case they have not been using YouTube’s account functionality at all until now.