It's a move that's been a long time coming. The service was launched in 2005, but was almost instantly overshadowed by the domineering YouTube, which debuted the same year. Google quickly gobbled up its fledgling competitor in 2006 for a cool $1.65 billion.
But Google Video continued to run in the background for five more years, ever-so slowly shutting down its services. In 2007, the site's remit changed from a two-bit YouTube mimic to a fully-fledged video search engine that crawled dozens of streaming video sites for results. In 2009, users could no longer upload new videos.
Now, Google wants to wipe it altogether, and isn't giving users long to rescue their content. This week the firm added a "download" button to all hosted videos, and is encouraging users to save their files and re-upload them to YouTube before the May deadline.
But that will leave hundreds of videos without a home. It's down to individual users to salvage their content, and if they forget or can't be bothered it'll be lost forever. Plus, YouTube's strict video length (the majority of user accounts can only upload videos of 15 minutes or less), means a lot of the longform content that kept Google Video partly-relevant will be homeless.
To help out, a group of digital archivists at Archive Team has stepped in to create an exhaustive backup of the site's estimated 2.5 to 2.8 million videos. The plan is to index and scrape as much content as possible before Google drops the giant off switch and upload the data to 100TB of storage space, which was donated by Archive.org.
The Archive Team describes itself as a "loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage." The site acts as a deathwatch for online shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions, and then works on indexing, scraping and archiving the content before its lost forever. The team last rescued a giant, 900GB torrent of deleted GeoCities sites.
If you want to chip in with the preservation process, head to the Google Video page on Archive Team and find out how you can use your processing power and bandwidth to help out.
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