Google Video

» see video.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

google video launched on 25 january 2005 as a search index for tv program transcripts. that lasted a few months before google flipped the pitch and turned it into an actual upload-and-host video service, one that competed with the small pack of independent video sites at the time (youtube on one side and veoh on the other, with dailymotion doing its own thing in europe). anyone with a google account could upload a clip and get an embed code.

this ran for about a year and a half before google bought youtube on october 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. the awkward part is that google had already spent most of a year building the exact product it just paid a huge sum for. the standard reading afterward is that google video was losing and google knew it, so buying youtube was the honest exit. but that left google with two video products doing the same job, which is a problem it never fully solved.

what actually happened is that google video kept accepting uploads for about three more years while youtube grew into itself. anyway, in may 2009 google disabled new uploads and made google video a search-across-the-web-for-video tool, which was closer to the original 2005 pitch than what it had become. the hosting piece hung on for videos already uploaded. in april 2011 google announced it would delete all remaining videos, walked that back after user complaints, and instead started migrating hosted files into the uploader's youtube account.

i was in my early twenties when google video launched, on a ttnet broadband line in ankara that had just become fast enough for embedded video without a plan. really though, i knew about google video the way anyone paying attention to google did in 2005-2006. i probably used it a handful of times before youtube took over entirely for me too, same as everyone else. the interesting bit is not that i used it, the interesting bit is that google shipped a whole video platform and then made it redundant with one purchase.

~ the record ~

~ the youtube problem ~

the internal justification for keeping google video alive after the 2006 acquisition was never publicly clear. anyway, one theory was that youtube's copyright liability was still uncertain and google video (with google account gating and paid-download infrastructure) was the safer property to lean on. another was inertia, that no one at google wanted to be the person who killed the product a lot of engineers had shipped the year before.

what got built on top of google video after the youtube purchase was the google video store, a paid-download storefront that launched in january 2006 selling nba games, cbs shows, some music videos. this closed in august 2007 without much fanfare. anyone who had bought videos through the store lost access to them, which was one of the earlier public examples of how a shutdown could vaporize purchases in the drm era. google refunded users with google checkout credit that most people did not know they had.

~ the long tail ~

by 2009 the strategy inside google was clear enough. youtube was going to be the video product, google video would slowly become a search tool, and eventually the hosting piece would get shut down. what surprised people was how long the long tail actually was. really though, the site kept serving old uploaded videos for another three years after uploads were disabled. embed codes from 2006 kept working on old blog posts into 2011. old family videos, old church-sermon uploads, old startup demo reels sat on google video servers for years past the point they should have been moved.

when google finally announced the shutdown in april 2011, the first plan was to delete the videos on may 13 of that year. blog posts by early uploaders got loud enough that google reversed the decision within a week and switched to a migration path instead. videos got copied into the uploader's youtube account with the original upload dates preserved. the actual shutdown of video.google.com as a hosting endpoint was 20 august 2012. after that the domain redirected to youtube search.

~ what got buried ~

what google video mostly represents is the fact that google was willing to buy its way out of a product race it was losing, even at a cost that seemed insane in 2006. the 1.65 billion dollar youtube purchase looked wildly overpriced at the time. by 2012 youtube was running video for basically the whole internet and no one remembered that google had spent 18 months trying to compete with it from inside. google video the product got quietly absorbed. google video the lesson (buy the winner, kill your own) is one of the operating patterns you can still see the company running.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »