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YouTube -- The Flickr of Video?
An anonymous reader writes "A new folksonomy website that seems to be catching on is YouTube, a service similar to Flickr, except that it is for sharing and hosting short video clips instead of photos. Like Flickr, its core functionality is implemented in Flash. Videos can be tagged, searched, discussed, etc through a social network. YouTube has developer APIs, RSS feeds, and the ability to embed videos directly into other web pages. The website was recently profiled on TechCrunch as an up-and-coming Web 2.0 application."
While it works well in Internet Explorer, I couldn't get videos to play in Firefox. In Opera, they started to play but after a few seconds it stops and wants to report a serious error to Microsoft. The second time I tried in Opera, it caused the screen to black out and rebooted my computer.
Would someone please be kind enough to explain how this site can be profitable or even break even for that matter. The bandwidth costs of a video site will NOT be offset by advertising revenue. I can't even believe that Flickr pays for itself through advertising.
Anyone that can offer real insight, and not the usual Slashdot-know-it-all-speak, would be greatly appreciated.
If you see the "Send this error to microsoft", it is most likely not Opera b0rking, but Windows Media Player. Try upgrading or reinstalling WMP.
:)
On a sidenote, opera does b0rk
Sites like www.newgruonds.com turn a profit serving 4-5 meg movies to every single user based purely on advertising. It isn't pretty but it can be done.
Well its more of a flash site, and not a video site.
Since most people can't save flash to their hard drives, they have to come back whenever they want to download anything.
The annoyance factor is through the roof. Investors look to that when seeing if an online startup has potential.
Then you just add your obligatory 2.?????, and wait for the cash to start rolling in.
Easy P Z, just like other hosted content services, they will eventually allow a limited number of free videos, but charge for larger quantities. I think it's a cool idea and well done. Worked fine for me using Safari on Mac OS Tiger 10.4.2.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
That they're not calling it pod-viewing (although I assume eventually there will be something similar), videoblogging (although people already use that for other things), or something similar. It's a video om the net and that's all it is!
Actually, only the Organizr requires Flash. The Organizr is required to sort your photostream (all the images you've uploaded) into different sets as well as adding images from your photostream into the photo pools of groups you belong to.
Of course, you can also use it to do other neat things, like mass-tagging images. But it is definitely not the "core functionality" - uploading, tagging, adding descriptions, browsing, adding tags and comments, etc, photos all do not require Flash.
Have a nice day! =)
Gnash Gnash Gnash
... until I see how they handle Slashdot!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
If I want to watch public access tv I can turn on the boob tube for free. Only an idiot would pay money to watch video of poor quality as I'm sure most of this stuff is.
so how long until its flooded with porn do we think?
one, maybe two weeks?
At one point and time, I had the following on my computer:
I needed all of those just so I could play video, since every website had its own different format. And my system was crawling at a slow when it loaded. When I looked at the system tray, it was filled with 15+ icons.
So I got rid of them all. I got tired of keeping track of what program was calling home. I got tired of Flash loading into websites when I did not want the Flash (like ESPN). I think the final straw was the slashdot story saying how Flash was not secure, that programs could exploit it. I figure the less programs running on a computer, the more secure that computer is.
Why can't everyone use one standard like MPEG? What is wrong with MPEG? It is perfect, anyone can play it, it does not require anything extra. The video quality of MPEG is better than any WMV or quicktime I have seen. And it does not require any downloads or special programs to play.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Ah, blogospheric neologisms...
"Folksonomy" apparently refers to keyword-based organization and tagging and such.
Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information. Folksonomy is not directly related to the concept of faceted classification from library science.
From the Wikipedia entry.
This Like That - fun with words!
The operative bit of code is this:
file = "get_video.php?video_id=" + _root.video_id;
So take whatever video_id you're looking at and paste it ontod =
http://v3.youtube.com/get_video.php?video_i
instead of anything useful, I got a buttload of raw crap dumped in my browser window.
Hopefully some other /.er can tell me what format its in.
P.S. The site ran fine in FireFox
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
No interface guidelines, no consistency, no control. But at least you get lag, lock in and centralization... Please do the internet a favor and avoid rich web apps where alternatives exist.
Video ads...
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I watched this one just fine.
New software mascot I'd say.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I watched two of its offerings: the zucchini-eating baby (which YouTube proffered), and the article's "all-time favorite", Matt Dances. The latter did have a certain something, no doubt about it... but neither induced me to eMail my friends about it, nor to expand my weekly routine for more...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
There are other sites doing this, though with different audiences, formats, etc.
Vidiac.com
PutFile.com
In my experience, the quality of the videos posted are often quite poor. The owners of the sites battle copyright issues constantly and risk being held responsible if their users post material illegally. Finally, the range of the audience affects the overall quality of the site. Videos that a 12-year-old finds funny may not be worth my time.
Not all the criticisms apply to this particular site or to all uses of the site, but it's there.
A few minutes after the crash of Air France 358 in Toronto, a YouTube user who lives in Toronto uploaded this footage of the smoldering wreckage. Apparently he just happened to drive by at the time, and was able to shoot this video from the freeway. You can hear the announcer on his car radio saying that spectators are running across the freeway to make videos of the crash with their cameras and cellphones. Under the video the YouTube user also provides a Google Maps link that shows precisely where the video was shot. http://www.youtube.com/?v=a0C5H9vjjN0
there's Our Media ("We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches."). &if you want to host your own site that lets people upload tagged video and dist via bit torrent, there's BroadcastMachine.
Microsoft is only mentioned in the error messages because they collect the crash data. After that they can pass it to partner companies who then can fix the crashes (they get crash dumps for WinDbg).
Also YouTube does not uses Windows Media video, it uses Macromedia Flash video format (FLV) - so it is most likely crash in Flash Player or in Firefox's/Opera's plug-in interface (Opera's is particularly bad).
Slashdot - free anti-Microsoft propaganda 24/7
Correction: That should be http://www.newgrounds.com/
Where's my free iPod!? Until then, I'll settle for a kiss...
I'm happy they didn't follow Flickr's "fuck vowels" attitude or we could have ended up with something like YuTub or YoTbe or Tb
http://www.vobbo.com./ You can Record live video directly to sever (no upload required). Upload media (videos, images, audio) for later playback. Post entries via email (camera and video phones). Form communities, groups. Create your homepage using your own URL. Mark your messages as private so only your friends can see. My wife and I use it to show make/show videos of our baby to family all over the country.
Shane www.pixelranger.com
They switched over to DHTML a while back after people comlained.
Videos aren't images. It takes way longer to watch even the shortest video than an image. Its much easier for an amateur to make a great photo than a great video. Etc. Of course, sharing videos on the net is inevitable but it'll be different in many nontechnical ways.
http://www.youtube.com/terms.php
Under section 4, it says:
Do you think this is fair ?
I used to be more into video, and may get back into it when HD cameras are a little cheaper and when distribution over the internet is easier- but currently I find taking still pictures much more rewarding.
The first thing wrong with video is that it has a default and sometimes fixed playback speed. Some players have fast forward and so forth but it is usually clunky to use, and some compression formats make scanning the video difficult. The result is most videos are very boring. With a bunch of pictures, it's very easy to move forward and backward at whatever speed I want, since most viewers understand that's what the user wants to do (although some shitty sites out there force a slideshow playback).
It's much lower quality than a picture from a similarly priced device. I'd rather look at a high res series of photographs capturing a few frames of something in motion rather than a smooth but thumbnail-sized video of equivalent size.
It presumes too much of what the viewer wants to see. A large photograph allows my eyes to scan to parts of interest at my leisure, a video typically reflects exactly what the person recording was interested in, flicking from thing to thing or over concentrated on something uninteresting to me personally.
It requires much more skill to capture well. You have to hold the camera steady through out the entire video, not just for a fraction of a second to take a still picture. A poor photographer who shoots a lot of pictures will probably end up with a few that could pass off as nearly professional, but a crappily taken video stays crappy no matter what.
Unless you set up a camera on a tripod, video taping something really removes you from the event because it requires constant attention on the tiny lcd screen rather than experiencing everything normally. To everyone else you don't even have a face, you're just a video camera. Taking a picture is a discrete event, inbetween you put the camera in your pocket or bag and are just experiencing everything normally again.
It is more annoying to have your video taken than have your picture taken. There's something more respectable about someone taking pictures than taking video. Video will capture little annoying things about you that you dislike, the way you said something or some mannerism, but a picture is just a tiny slice.
It's difficult and very time consuming to edit. And of course any editing is presumptuous of what the viewer would like to get out of the video. Editing with pictures is natural- just don't upload the pictures that turned out bad (and like I mentioned before, it's easy to skip over uninteresting pictures quickly).
The file sizes are huge, unless quality and length is compromised. This makes video hard to share and distribute, over the internet or even in person. Everyone you know will probably hate you if you force them to sit through 30 minutes of vacation video, but if you let them flip through a book of pictures they're going to like it much more. Someone on the internet may invest very little time to look at some of my pictures, but it's doubtful anyone is going to download a video for ten minutes without a good reason (like the promise of female nudity, say, or the recommendation of a trustworthy blog).
Perhaps many of these problems will be addressed eventually, sites like youtube may lead to some solutions (the flash playback seems awful- how do I save the video and send it to someone, burn it on a dvd, edit it into my own remix of various found videos?).
Not only is this site working when using Firefox 1.0.6 (on a G5 running OSX3.9), I signed up for the YouTube service to see if I can get it to stream an enhanced podcast. To my surprise, the service accepted the *.m4a file and YourTube was broadcast it. (I yet have to test this using the Windows XP machine...) http://www.youtube.com/?v=ck2WBDruO1g Granted there are artifacts and the sound quality nose-dived (These problems don't exist when played in iTunes) but I'm very impressed because it seems this service can make it possible for people to see these files outside of using iTunes. (A major complaint by listeners when using enhanced features who don't use iTunes to listen tho their podcasts.)
| Information is the currency |
LOL. Raised eyebrows indeed... These days there is need for testing brandnames out as geographically widely as possible before committing to them. FYI, a lot of people in the north of England will understand that to mean "Your anal passage". Seriously.
This wired article on vlogging highlighted a number of new video sites including one called RocketBoom. RocketBoom's author, Amanda Congdon, puts up new video content everyday, Monday through Friday, and by all appearances does a great job. Each day is a separate html page providing quicktime, winmedia and torrent versions of her clips.
.mov and .wmv files run about 20-30MB in size. To properly experience the site requires a good broadband connection, which I have. So far so good.
A typical clip runs about 2-3 minutes and the
But it begs the question: who's paying for all that server bandwidth? She solicits no donations, and seems to have survived the exposure wired.com gave her. Can sites like these truly be done inexpensively? If so, how?
For the record, I have no affiliation with her, have never met her, but enthusiastically applaud her efforts. If it is indeed easy to acquire the resources, bandwidth and video production tools necessary to create quality vlog content my guess is we're probably seeing the beginning of a true internet paradigm shift. My gut tells me however, that's a big 'if.'
I'll leave the question of whether we should or not for another day.
Sounds like someone just needs to learn how to admin their computer.
doesn't matter what programs you have on your computer, if you aren't using them at that particular moment, they don't need to be running in your systray.
this is a common misperception from alot of newer computer users - or people that buy dell & other 'name brand' computers. they come shipped with so much crap on them that it's ridiculous.
Gekido's Lair
zzzz. Anyone else bored by these new technology developments in the social sector?
"The bandwidth costs of a video site will NOT be offset by advertising revenue. I can't even believe that Flickr pays for itself through advertising."
I'm just going to be totally honest and say "I don't know". However, a theory pops into mind. They may simply be getting a good deal on bandwidth. My company is paying $120 for a terabyte of bandwidth a month. Past that, it's a dollar a gig. Assuming the company we're hosting through is making a profit (well... it's possible they're banking on the fact that not everybody will hit that limit...) it's fairly easy to imagine that they're getting bandwidth for a reasonable cost. In other words, their costs of operations may be smaller than we initially imagine.
Then consider that right now, it doesn't appear that they're hosting ads. That says to me that they're got funding to operate for a while. It's possible they're getting people hooked so they can work out their ad strategy. Now, there's an intersting thing this service provides that makes it ideal for advertising. If the videos that are submitted are decently categorized, they've got a good target audience right there. Something like Google ads, for example, could be well targeted right there. Get enough people coming and going, and a revenue stream is sure to trickle in. Start getting millions of hits, and it may just work out for the better.
So, to me, it's possible. The catch is they have to keep their company small. I wouldn't rule out, though, that this is a 'grab investors' game intended to play out along side Google's video service.
"Derp de derp."
FWIW I'm one the co-founders of http://vidiac.com/ Mentioned above by "lukewarmfusion", and yes we do offer a similar service, though we specialize in offering free video hosting branded under your website, and then let web site owners decide what sort of video content they want their portal to specialize in.
I'll answer what questions I can that I've seen posted here.
1.) Does advertising pay the bills? Yes, but it's very low margin unlike picture hosting and the like. There are many ways to make a living on this, from syndicating the best content to providing pay-per view for high end content. Our goal though will be to be able and pay back the content creators for their submissions "leveling the playing field" and allowing indie artist to make a living creating quality content.
2.) Why Flash player? We're using Windows Media and are preparing to launch a Flash option. We're finding that the 20% of the population Windows Media doesn't reach is covered by Flash. There are no elegant solutions out there. I've seen some good Javaplayers like on2, but the problem becomes that sites like MySpace and Xanga limit their user's ability to post Java making embedding videos difficult. Our solution will be to offer both and let users pick what works for them. Real and Quicktime have their own pros and cons as well, but right now the most ubiquitous player is Flash7. With 15,000 videos submitted to our system since February though it's expensive to diversify into more than two formats (transcode time and storage)
Right now we stand on an interesting convergence of cheap video editing software, inexpensive video recorders, cheap hard drive space and bandwidth that is starting to become affordable. I think you will see many new Video hosting portals cropping up in the comming year. Our Software is an "ASP-hosted" software solution that lets you create your own portal for your web site, and not to brag on ourselves too much, it's been a huge success. We're now streaming 370K videos a day to 50K people across 30 sites using our solution.
Like any new communication format, it will go through it's trials and tribulations in the coming year, and I'm sure we'll see a lot of garbage, but I think we'll also see a lot of good come out of it. My Favorite example of that is Anthony Carlone who is Video-Blogging xBox games. He's very young, and right now his reviews are rough, but who's to say that he won't turn into his own "G4-television" channel in the future?
http://xboxcountry.freevideoblog.com/
Anyhow I'm just happy that I'm playing some part of this, and every day I find it neat to see how our software is being used.
Adam Bruce
Vidiac.com