A thief was convicted and fined after being spotted on a video posted on the Web site YouTube.

The man was taped slowly circling the store, stealing a laptop computer, slipping the computer into his overcoat and stepping out of the store in the South Island town of Greymouth, local media reported Friday.

The whole performance was posted on YouTube - set to “The Pink Panther” music track - and attracted 500,000 hits from around the globe.

One viewer recognized the man and alerted police. Dawson Anthony Bliss, 50, was convicted of theft in Greymouth District Court on Thursday after pleading guilty.

Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, aimed at users with large picture, music or video file collections.

The annual prices established were $20 for 6 gigabytes of online storage, $75 for 25 GB, $250 for 100 GB and $500 for 250 GB.

Google said the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the e-mail service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which are the company’s word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Gmail users currently get nearly 3 GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1 GB. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.

Yahoo Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL already offer unlimited free storage for their e-mail services.

Google Inc. is shutting down a service that sold and rented online video, ending a 19-month experiment doomed by the proliferation of free clips on other Web sites like the Internet search leader’s YouTube subsidiary.

The decision, confirmed late Friday, underscores Google’s intention to concentrate its financial muscle and brainpower on developing an advertising format to capitalize on the immense popularity of online video.

YouTube, which Google bought last year for $1.76 billion, is expected to be the focal point of the company’s expansion into video advertising. Google executives hope to settle on an effective advertising system for video ads by the end of this year.

Google already makes most of its money from ads, but most of those are static, text-based messages posted alongside search results and other written content on the Web.

The video section on Google’s Web site will remain open, but will stop showing paid programming Aug. 15.