I don't consider 13 days notice to be graceful. Imagine someone going on holidays for two weeks and coming back to find out their beloved video is lost forever.

Google isn't obligated to give a fair amount of notice but it'd be a nice thing to do. Don't be evil.

The TechCrunch article says people have until May 13 to download the videos. You just can't stream them after April 29.

Still, this is a pretty bad job on Google's part IMHO. More notice would have been good. (What if people were traveling or were sick for a month or something?) Plus Google should have an option to automatically transfer videos to Youtube.

Can't understand why Google's messing this up so badly.

In terms of public relations (when it comes to the "unwashed masses"), Google has always been a very reactive company. This is at the core of some of their most intractable problems / failure to perform (e.g. "social").

I see your point, but who is uploading videos to Google then deleting the source? These services are for sharing and streaming, not archiving.

I don't work for Google but I do work on large scale data hosting. When you shut a service down you have multiple phases. Step 1, stop capturing new data. Google Video did this years ago and anyone truly invested in the service knew what was up back then. Step 2, pick a date to stop serving existing data. Step 3, wait for a very long time for more requests to get data back. It is crazy how and why these trickle in years after the fact. Step 4, delete data. I bet Google wont actually delete data for a very long time if ever.

Maybe step 2 is aggressive, but in my experience 90 days notice doesn't make a difference. Nobody does anything until the last few days if ever. You just have to draw a line in the sand.

It is very hard to shut a service down with any sort of usage, let alone Google scale usage. But very important to do from time to time. This is what I respect.