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From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life
powerline22 writes "From the people who gave you the Internet Archive comes Ourmedia, a place for grassroots media to flourish. Upload anything, maybe a video, some pictures, your custom applescript, and it gets hosted for free, for life. Drupal is hosting the site, and the Internet Archive is providing hosting and bandwidth for the files."
How long can this really last? Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Admins need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.
The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.
It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.
I Want To Believe
That's a mantra for C21st America if ever I heard one. Of course there's such a thing as 'free'. Yeah, someone pays, but if it ain't me, then it's free. If I end up with two copies of a book and I give one away, I've paid for both but the surplus copy is entirely free to whoever I give it to. If I help a friend out with their PC, I pay with my time, but the service is free to them. Things are sometimes done in kindness, or in the service of a better world, even in this day and age. Don't let 'them' convince you otherwise.
Of course, free iPod schemes are a different matter, and I'd imagine this kind of cynical appeal to the frugally covetous is what you're talking about. But I don't equate archive.org with the architects of those kind of schemes. It IS still possible to get something good and decent for free, and that's something to be thankful for.