Google Video is a free video sharing website and also a video service from Google that allows anyone to upload video clips to Google's web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge; some videos are also offered for sale through the Google Video Store.

Uploaded videos were saved as a .gvi files under the "Google Videos" folder in "My Videos" and reports of the video(s) details are logged and stored in the user account. The report sorts and lists the number of times that each of the users videos have been viewed and downloaded within a specific time frame. These range from the previous day, week, month or the entire time that the videos have been there for. Totals are calculated and displayed and the information can be downloaded into a spreadsheet format or printed out.

Competing services include iFilm, Metacafe, Veoh, blip.tv, IKlipz.com, and Outloud.tv. On October 9, 2006 Google agreed to buy former competitor YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, but YouTube will remain a separate service under its own identity for the near future, though Google video searches include YouTube results as well.

Google announced on June 13, 2007 that the Google Video search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in addition to YouTube's and their own uploads. Search result links now open a frameset with a Google Video header at the top, and the original player page below it, similar to the way the Google Images search results are presented.

Video content

Google Video is geared towards providing a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, Internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.

A number of educational discourses by Google employees have been recorded and made available for viewing via Google Video. The lectures have been done mainly at the employees' former universities. The topics cover Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field.

Various media companies offered content on Google Video for purchase, including CBS programs, NBA, music videos, and independent film. Initially, the content of a number of broadcasting companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN) was available as free streaming content or stills with closed captioning. In addition, the U.S. National Archive uses Google Video to make historic films available online.

Google Video also searches other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Video in addition to their own videos and YouTube include GoFish, ExposureRoom, Vimeo, MySpace, Biku, and Yahoo! Video. It appears that Google Video is moving away from an online video archive and towards a search engine for videos, similar to their web and image searches.