No, YouTube hasn’t shut down.
That’s the headline Google chose to put on its blog post announcing that YouTube is about to move onto iTunes’ turf. To be specific: the video site is offering its first experimental video downloads for sale (it first started offering a handful of downloads last month.)
As PaidContent points out, Google has been down this road before, with a video store on Google Video. That closed down in 2007.
That probably explains the extremely low-key nature of the announcement about the latest attempt to sell downloadable video.
It makes sense. For now, downloading video looks like a minority pastime, certainly when set against the massive audience for streaming video on YouTube. So adding this as an extra feature on YouTube as a service to the video creators, rather than as a full-blown store, sounds about right.
It might even help YouTube make some money on the side – though it hardly sounds like the answer to the sites ongoing monetisation headache.
