In the last months online video sites have become really popular and lots of them are popping-up. You know what they are: Metacafe, Google Video, iFilm and, perhaps the most popular of all them YouTube.

Yeah, they are a great way to share your videos and find content from other users and I have used them to embed some videos existing videos in my weblogs. But what’s the use of it if you want to share something and you can’t do it for three days?

I’m not talking about YouTube being down for most of the day but about Google Video, where I haven’t been able to get something published in three days. Do you think it has any value by now?

But, let’s get some perspective. I write in a coletive weblog about gadgets. We like to publish fresh news and sometimes we embed some video in the posts to illustrate the gadget we are talking about. Three days ago (March 8th) I tried to upload a video to Google Video. I had never done that so I didn’t know I had to download and install an additional program to do. Is this the Web2.0 era? Doesn’t everything now work in the browser? It’s so difficult to program a web-based uploader? (It isn’t, the rest of video services do it, quite badly but do it).

OK, anyway I install the uploader and upload the video I wanted to share. I didn’t have explicit consent from the owner to upload this video, but as it was downloable from his homepage I think it isn’t a big problem. Once I uploaded it i checked in the site and saw that it was being verified. So far so good, I thought, they have to check the content of the video is legal and all that, in one or two hours I will be able to see it.

After waiting for a long time the video continued in “verification” state. I got tired of waiting and went to YouTube, searched for it and, with the right keywords, I found it ready to use. Some copy and paste of the code they offer and it was all ready.

Three days later this is the message Google Video still gives me:

So I can’t use it and I don’t have any use for it now. It is using space in their servers and I don’t think anyone will ever see it.

What’s the moral of the story? In first place I should have checked it the video was already in YouTube (probably it is, it was in this case). In second place YouTube should improve their upload service. I tried to upload three times and from different browser and I was unable to do it, all I got was a blank screen and no response from the server (I know it usually works, I have uploaded videos other times and it worked). Third, don’t use Google Video if you don’t want to wait for some days to see the video.

Fourth, YouTube should get a pay-per-view service as Google does. For me the quality and download speed of the videos is enough and if the price is down enough many people would pay to watch them. But don’t get a pay-once view-once service, I want to see the videos I have payed for as much times as I want and from whenever I want.

And the last, these pages try too hard to protect their videos from being downloaded but it doesn’t work, there are video downloaders updated continuosly which allow you to get the video locally. Work harder in improving the user experience and they won’t need to download the videos.

Anybody has had better experiences than me?