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Posted by Bindu Reddy, Google Video
Product Manager

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. Here's how we're hoping to fix
things:

We're
giving a full refund — as a credit card refund — to everyone who
ever bought a video. We'll
need you to make sure we have your most recent credit card
information, but once we know where to send the money, you'll
get it.

You can still keep the Google Checkout credit that you've
received already. Think of it as an additional 'we're sorry
we goofed' credit.

We're going to continue to support playing your videos for
another six months. We won't be offering the ability to buy
additional videos, but what you've already downloaded will
remain playable on your computer.

We take pride in moving quickly, and we think this philosophy helps
to create lots of new and innovative products. But it also leads to
errors that — upon reflection and your feedback — we need to
rectify. This was one of them. We make mistakes; we do our best not
to repeat them — and we really do try to fix the ones we make.
That said, the very least that our users should expect from us is
that our mistakes be new and innovative, too.

We appreciate your responses, and hope our actions convey just how
seriously we take everyone's feedback. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Bindu, google, manager, Posted, product, Reddy, video