Google's listening. After notifying the world last week that Google Video was shutting down with no videos viewable after April 29, and giving users until May 13 to download them before they would be removed, Google's backed away from that.

Numerous voices spoke out, asking why Google couldn't create a quick way to transfer videos from Google Video to another of its video services, YouTube. Good news: The company's done just that.

Besides eliminating that ominous April 29 deadline, Google says it's "working to automatically migrate your Google Videos to YouTube." In the meantime, Google's added an "Upload Videos to YouTube" option, making it easy to send videos from a Google Video account to an associated YouTube account.

Here are the details from Google, posted on Google's Webmaster Central blog on Friday and sent out to all Google video users early on April 23:

Dear Google Video User, Last week we sent an email letting you know we would be ending playbacks of Google Videos on April 29 and providing instructions on how to download videos currently hosted on the platform. Since then we’ve received feedback from you about making the migration off of Google Video easier. We work every day to make sure you have a great user experience and should have done better. Based on your feedback, here’s what we’re doing to fix things. 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. If you want to migrate to YouTube now, here’s how you do it: We’ve created an “Upload Videos to YouTube” option on the Google Video status page. To do this, you’ll need to have a YouTube account associated with your Google Video account (you can create one here). Before doing this you should read YouTube’s Terms of Use and Copyright Policies. If you choose this option, we’ll do our best to ensure your existing Google Video links continue to function.







If you’d prefer to download your videos from Google Video, that option is still available. As we said nearly two years ago, the team is now focused on tackling the tough challenge of video search. We want to thank the millions of people around the world who have taken the time to create and share videos on Google Video. We hope today's improvements will help ease your transition to another video hosting service. Thank you for being a Google Video user. Sincerely, Mark Dochtermann Google Video Team

It's great to see Google taking action on this, but we're wondering why the company didn't offer this option in the first place.