Google’s first video uploading and playback service, Google Video is shutting down soon. Google sent out E-mails regarding the shutdown of the service by April 29, 2011 and videos to be downloadable for local storage until May 13, 2011.

Google had started the service in 2005 which was widely used at the time of launch. Thereafter, Google acquired YouTube in 2006, which became a very popular platform to upload, host and share videos. With the rise in usage of YouTube, Google disabled the ability to upload videos on Google Video in 2009.

How to make the shift?

• The tedious step is to download the video in an FLV format, save it locally and then upload to preferred video hosting service. This is a long process and can take quite a while as each video would be downloaded individually.
• An alternate option, and an easier one, is to use the option of ‘Upload Videos to YouTube’ which makes the transition easier. Google provided this button after many users complained of the previous option being hard to manage and put in place. For now, Google has removed the timeline of April 29 as the date of shutdown until further notice.

As an update, Google statement read:

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

With this update, it’s expected that Google would focus its energy in facilitating searching of videos through Google Video.