One of the last things I do with each weekday Hmmcast is upload to Google Video. I realize many videobloggers are using YouTube these days but there is something about Google Video that is less messy and more friendly to me. Yeah, much, much bigger audience potential at YouTube, better for marketing, yadda, yadda, but at the end of the day when you like something better — even if it is from the same company — some will go with that instead. Since the same company owns both, why doesn’t YouTube have those useful Google video permalinks yet?

For those who have already pegged Google Video dead — it seems inevitable that Google will just make all video YouTube someday — but remain somewhat curious what’s been happening from someone still using the Google Video service regularly, my point of view follows.

Google Video stats suck
Firstly, don’t even bother looking at Google Video stats. They’re not accurate at all. For example, some days video view totals show more than the “all time” in the stats. How can that be? The right hand isn’t talking, er, I mean adding to the left hand. That’s ok, I’m not really a stats monger anyway.

Wildly varying processing times
After uploading a new video it can take anywhere from a few seconds, to minutes to hours for the video to fully process. You’d think size of the video would matter but most of the Hmmcasts are 10MB and under and can’t make any sense out of why the processing times vary so wildly. YouTube’s video uploader has a progress meter while Google Video doesn’t. Google Video has a separate video uploader program that asks you to login every time you want to upload a video. That gets old fast, so I usually stick with the web uploader.

The processing time at YouTube is usually faster than Google Video however there are times that Google Video is faster perhaps because the queue of videos to convert isn’t as large at Google Video.

Video uploading out today
Today when I went to upload to Google Video I saw the “temporarily unable to upload” message for the first time pictured at the top of this post. My first thought was: is this the end?

The official Google Video Blog threw in the towel on March 2, changing venues to the YouTube blog. Neither blog has any explanation for the strangeness that has been Google Video stats or why there is a temporary outage today for uploads. I didn’t email them and ask but honestly the explanation for those things is less interesting to me than what the long term plans for both entities will be. I thought the plan was going to be to run both as separate entities. At least for awhile.

Will they tell me what they plan to do with Google Video after spending all that money stock acquiring them? Doubtful. What would I like them to do? Make Google Video the primary search engine for both sites. A neat, clean video portal like they have now only including all the assets they acquired from YouTube. No need to change the look of the YouTube site, but add the content from that site into the cleaner looking Google Video. This way if somebody uploads at YouTube they’ll get the best of both worlds. However, I have a suspicion that Google Video will get axed in favor of the more popular YouTube, meaning those of us who don’t like the YouTube look will be stuck with it or be forced to move elsewhere.

Hope that doesn’t happen.

Do you like any other video site better than YouTube?
Again, I’m probably in a very small minority that actually likes Google Video more than YouTube. I don’t expect anybody many (anybody) to agree with me on this one. It is more than subjective though and I like it both from a person wanting to watch different videos, but also from a publisher standpoint. Would be curious to hear other videobloggers as well as those who watch video blogs opinions on the matter.

For today’s Hmmcast readers might have already noticed I used YouTube.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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