Google Video was created in January 2005 as an effort by Google to take control of Internet searches for audiovisual content.

The service was first called Google Video Search and it was created to look for information within television programs. In the beginning, it only indexed material from eight television networks in the United States. In order to view or upload videos, it was necessary to download an application to your computer. The aim was to create an online television channel.

It was released in permanent beta status, as is usual with all new Google services. In Google’s words, the company justified its new creation with the following statement: “Our mission is to organize the world’s information, and that includes video.”

By now you all know that Google bought YouTube in October 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. But Google Video was created even before YouTube, although the aims of the two were completely different. YouTube focused on users, collecting their content at no charge and exclusively through the use of its browser, something which Google Video did not do, and which was surely the cause of its failure.

Google Video used an application called Google Video Viewer as its desktop application. The development of this application came out of the VLC Video LAN open source project. This was a major obstacle for users, who had many problems with its use and installation. Meanwhile, YouTube made it possible to view and upload videos without the need for any additional software.

In January 2006, Google announced a service to supplement the video search engine, called Google Video Store, where users could access audio-visual content by paying for it. The content was supplied by firms such as Sony BMG.

Four months after the presentation of Google Video Store and more than a year after the launch of the video search engine (May 2006), Google Video had barely captured 6.48% of the world’s searches for online videos, ranking 5th after YouYube (42.94%), MySpace (24.22%), Yahoo! (9.58%) and MSN (9.21%).

After the acquisition of YouTube, the fate of Google Video was uncertain. In the summer of 2007 the paid content service was shut down and all of its interests were devoted to the new acquisition, the absolute leader in online video: YouTube.

Currently, the service is only used as a video search engine for different sources such as YouTube, Google Video itself, Daily Motion and Metacafe. Although it continues to allow video uploads, the vast majority of those indexed are from other services.

Experts say the most logical thing is that it will end up disappearing. But for the moment, there it remains.