Effective on Wednesday, Google Video will no longer allow users to buy or rent videos nine months after it was launched. While the paid video service comes to an end, Google Video continues its free service on beta.
This latest development will leave those who bought or rented video content from Google unable to view their clips. Also, instead of allowing them to have their money refunded for videos purchased before July 18, Google offers customers fixed credit on Google checkout.
“Both Google and YouTube are exploring a wide variety of ways to monetize online video content — from pilot testing AdSense for video syndication to trying various ad formats on YouTube — and the early results have been very encouraging,” said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker in an e-mail to Computerworld. “Reaffirming our commitment to building out our ad-supported monetization models for video, we have decided to remove the DTO/DTR feature on Google Video.”
The move was already foreseen back when YouTube was acquired by Google. The plan was to market Google Video as a video search engine, while YouTube focuses on video hosting and sharing.
Originally posted on August 14, 2007 @ 8:42 am
Stale. Read about this story already last week.
Cash refunds in lieu of Google Checkout credits are available. See
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=74495&topic=11489