The Google Vidapocalypse has been postponed when the search giant came out to tell its expectant users that they won’t need to worry about their video content, stored on their Video service. The shut down of Google Video is no longer planned for April 29^th. With it goes the fears that users would lose all their lovely content if they didn’t act fast enough.

Friday, Google backpedaled on the apparent ultimatum about data accessibility and have delivered a much better solution,

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.

Pfew!

When I heard that Google would be shutting down Google Video, I felt like the Internet was losing a powerful video archival service. The corporation has done an excellent job of preparing YouTUBE to take over what Google Video does for the Internet, however, so it makes sense that they’re going to transfer the data between those services.

To make it as easy as possible, Google is permitting any user who has a Google Video and a YouTUBE account to opt-in to a data transfer.

With an extension on the deadline, this means that we need not worry about as many works vanishing into the ether of cyberspace. Already, when I heard the original announcement, I felt like a great deal of orphan works (or those with users who have simply forgotten) would suddenly vanish from the Internet. For the longest time, Google Video presented one of the only services that allowed up to 2 hour videos. This made it the perfect place to put out-of-circulation documentaries, old out-of-copyright TV broadcasts, or just extremely long goofing-off videos like Let’s Plays and et cetera. For a very long time, YouTUBE only permitted 10 minute videos—for those unlucky enough to miss the original Director accounts; although this changed last year—and that made Google Video even more enticing for long-form videos.

With Google’s deadline extension and increase ease-of-transfer, we’ll probably see a lot more of these videos saved. Orphaned media will probably still be lost, but as sad as this makes me, it’s a way of life in archiving that if something isn’t curated by someone it ends up fading away.

With the YouTUBE data side-load capability, Google has retained the option to download the video locally.