Back in 2005, three former PayPal mates huddled together and ended up making a small startup project. The idea was a service that let users upload their own videos to the web and share them to others. It was an instant hit even though it was not technically the first service that let users upload videos. Metacafe for example, was doing that since 2002. Google had also started Google Videos on January 25 – that very year. Anyway, unlike other Google projects, Google Videos did not go on to become a huge success – but YouTube did.
By 2006, it had become the largest video site on the planet and Google decided that it was time they bought the company over. In November 2006, YouTube was bought over by Google for a cool $1.65 billion.That was when everyone thought that Google Videos would be eventually shut down. However, that was not to be. It existed as a parallel service to YouTube until now – a good five years after YouTube was acquired. However, Google has now decided that it has had enough of Google Video and has sent out notifications to users that the service would be shut down on April 29, 2011.
All content uploaded to the website would be available till May 13, 2011 for download after which they would be deleted. Uploaders have been asked to download their videos from the site and re-upload them to YouTube. That said, people are wondering why Google didn’t make the job simpler by helping them migrate the videos to YouTube directly – without having to go through the process of downloading and re uploading.
Anyway, if you still visit Google Videos occasionally, you might want to take a quick look at it because it would soon be relegated to the annals of history.
