Slashdot Mirror
YouTube's Growing Competition
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek looks at YouTube's rapidly growing imitators and questions the site's long-term viability. In addition to the competition, YouTube continues to face problems caused by its reliance on copyrighted material; the site's popularity is service- (rather than emotion-) based, which makes it a ripe target for anyone that might replicate and improve the service. From the article: 'YouTube's own challengers are advancing at a rapid rate. AOL is re-engineering its video site to mirror YouTube's success, and CNN is launching CNN Exchange, which will house user-contributed video features. Then there are sites like Eefoof.com, Panjea.com, Revver and Blip.TV, which share up to 50 percent of ad page revenue with the creator of the videos. Others like Dabble.com (currently in beta) sort through all video hosting sites (like YouTube and its competition) for search content, while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest.'"
In a shocking development, all of the sites mentioned in the slashdot article are working just fine... except pornotube.com.
Do any of these copycats offer actual video downloads, or are all of these guys locking up content behind various streaming schemes?
Also, is there any way to bust the video out of a Flash Video player? I'd like to view some of these videos under Linux on AMD64 w/out installing the 32-bit Firefox and Flash It seems like it should be possible to extract the streaming link from the Flash file somehow and just grab the content w/out the player. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?
Program Intellivision!
Brand recognition isn't everything. With sites like Truveo and Blinkx TV, you can just search through all the various video websites out there, no matter what site they're on.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
These sites are a good reflection on the current state of video technology. All these sites use Flash video: A low-quality proprietary solution that requires on a 3rd-party plug-in. The only one that tried using a standard video format was Google Video, and they quickly abandoned that in the beta phase because it was too complicated to support.
I think it is a sad state of affairs that these sites don't (or can't) just use embedded mp4 files. It shows how video standards have failed and a proprietary solution is more ubiquitous. This will make archival very difficult.
Has a simpler interface and better search
And does a much better job of obeying copyright.
Youtube is only as good as its current copyright stance lasts. Once a major lawsuit from a copyright holder happens, Youtube is going to go the way of napster and MP3.com. It'll still be around, but it'll probably have to start erring on the side of too restrictive. Google started out trying to avoid copyright problems, and it will be able to defend itself against copyright lawsuits. That being the case, they won't need to have a period of time where they overreact.
Still, I hate searching in youtube. There's way to much junk in it - not unlike the internet as a whole - and they don't rate videos like google seems to be able to do. Perhaps they need to use the google rank of each video (this video is linked to by x websites using the following keywords) so better videos float to the top of searches.
As the information increases, good searching still seems to be key to a good service. Google seems to know its business. I'm waiting for them to bend their processing power to analyzing video and audio to automatically pull out people and words.
-Adam