Wendy Schollum: Uproar over video move

A vocal online protest has prompted search engine giant Google to rethink its decision to delete the video data of thousands of its users.
Last week anyone who had a video uploaded to the now-outmoded Google Video platform received an email informing them that playback of their videos would cease this Friday and they had until May 13 to download a copy of their video, before it would be deleted and lost forever.
This decision is Google's final attempt to kill off its user-overlooked brainchild.
Google Video was initially launched in January 2005, but was largely ignored as massive online interest evolved in another video viewing and sharing website, launched just one month after Google Video, YouTube.
Quickly recognising that there was only room in the market for one major video social media website (and Google Video was losing the battle), Google bought its former competitor website in November 2006 for a reported $1.65 billion.
In early 2009, Google abandoned Google Video in preference of its much faster growing asset, YouTube, and notified Google Video users that they would no longer be able to upload videos to the platform. They also assured users that any videos already uploaded to the website would continue to be hosted free.
This is why last week's email announcement informing users that their videos would soon be deleted caused such uproar and has seen Google quick to backtrack.
On Saturday, Google issued a revised announcement stating they had "received feedback from you about making the migration off of Google Video easier" and "Google Video users can rest assured that they won't be losing any of their content and we are eliminating the April 29 deadline".
Having been challenged by their consumers, Google is now working on a system to automatically move Google Videos to YouTube - something Google Video users with hundreds of video uploads (embedded on thousands of different websites) will be relieved to hear.
If you have videos uploaded to Google Video, I would still suggest taking the time to download a copy of these (if only to back up your valuable data) and start making a list of any websites your video appears on (that you would still like it to), so that when your video is moved over to YouTube (and the link to your video is changed) these websites can be updated.
Wendy Schollum is a web strategist and managing director of Xplore.net Solutions Ltd (www.xplore.net). For more information on using social media to market your business follow the Xplore.net team on Twitter (www.twitter.com/xploreNET), email support@xplore.net or call 0800 100 900.