Late last night, Google decided to give us Google Video users a break, possibly in part to banter over the issue among bloggers. They even admitted they were wrong.
Gasp! Don’t they know that they’re a large, publicly traded company? You can just go around… doing right! It’s almost.. un-evil… 
Enough kidding. Here’s a quote:
When your friends and well-intentioned acquaintances tell you that you’ve made a mistake, it’s good to listen. So we’d like to say thank you to everyone who wrote to let us know that we had made a mistake in the case of Google Video’s Download to Own/Rent Refund Policy vs. Common Sense.
To recap: we decided to end the Google Video download to own/rent (DTO/DTR) program, and are now refocusing our Google Video engineering efforts. The week before last, we wrote to Google Video DTO/DTR program customers to let them know that videos they’d already bought would no longer be playable.
We planned to give these users a full refund or more. And because we weren’t sure if we had all the correct addresses, latest credit card information, and other billing challenges, we thought offering the refund in the form of Google Checkout credits would entail fewer steps and offer a better user experience. We should have anticipated that some users would see a Checkout credit as nothing more than an extra step of a different (and annoyingly self-serving) kind. Our bad.
The blog post goes on to say that anyone who ever bought a video will get a full refund, the credit they gave will still be usable, and, you can play your videos for another six months.
I have another suggestion to add for those of you who have videos from Google video that you paid for and want to keep indefinitely.
You can:
1- Download them in Video ipod format, which gives it to you in mp4, as opposed to in the Google video player, which you can then convert, or play in iTunes or Quicktime. It won’t be in full quality at full screen, but it’s something.
2- If you’re on Windows (even on a Mac), get the Real Basic Player Beta version 11, which will allow you to download and keep the video, though not convert it to other formats. Their beta is open, any Windows user can download it, as long as they surf from a computer while running Windows.
3- Get the Veoh.TV beta player, which also allows you to download video from the web. When I got access a few months ago, the beta was closed, but it doesn’t appear to be asking for a serial number any more, though it hasn’t been officially announced. I didn’t go through the whole process, so if anyone knows, please reply.
If not, I’d join their group in Facebook and see if you can gain access. In the meantime, if anyone knows how to access their invites, let me know. I might have some I don’t even know about.
News about Google video discovered via Om Malik’s post on NewTeeVee.
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