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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.'"
No sooner does he endorse it or the end draws near....
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
http://www.pornotube.com/
Waves goodbye to your bandwidth.
Something important to note is that one user can upload videos to any or all of the top video sites. YouTube et al will have to offer some incentive for a user to stay with their service for the long term.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
but brand recognition is whats a winner here.
I am reminded of iPod killing headlines.
liqbase
In a shocking development, all of the sites mentioned in the slashdot article are working just fine... except pornotube.com.
Pretty amazing the article doesnt mention Google Video...it has to be one of Youtube's major competitors too. Has a simpler interface and better search...
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
"while specialty video sites like Pornotube concentrate on one point of interest"
Well waking up to a Slashdot story specifically referring to what's in my pants certainly is a new one.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Forgive me if this is raised in TFA... but the brand that youtube now has is very important. If I want to see a video of some viral incident, or a TV trailer or clip, I turn to youtube, because I'm familiar with it. I've only just about heard of some of the others, never mind used them. Surely we saw the same effect in the search engine market... everyone knows that Google isn't necessarily the best, but I still go there first and only go somewhere else if I get no joy. The same will happen with youtube - just what can its competitiors offer that beats youtube? Easily accessible video at a good speed and with a big audience (to both see your footage and to upload their own interesting clips) is what it's for, and that's what they do well. Why go anywhere else? And naturally, the last thing I want is the fragmenting of the market, with different comaparable audiences at all sites, since then I'd have to search multiple sites instead of one.
Who wants to "compete" with YouTube's "business model"?
Damn you, YouTube! I can lose money through a free video service *much* faster than you can! I can have an even sketchier idea of how to recover costs! I can make it easier for people to block ads!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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!
The problems for YouTube aren't easy to overcome. They've got a reputation for being free and easy to use, which is really the problem. If they decided to implement a poster-frame ad at the end of each video to generate revenue (like Revver does), they'd be dealing with money, which would immediately necessitate making things harder to do. For one, the identity of the uploader would be more important, as would the possibility of Daily Show clips getting some random uploader cash. On top of that, advertisers are very picky about where their ads appear, so while they might be happy to have 10,000,000 impressions, they wouldn't be happy if half of them came from sites that were otherwise porn-related (well, not necessarily). The administrative overhead of doing ads would probably undercut its value, and the friction it creates would make people move to free-er sites.
Maybe they just need to create a second class of user, verified accounts, where they can put ads on their videos*. I figure they've got to do something soon, because their reputation is about to eat them alive.
* this assumes that single-frame ads at the end of videos are not offensive. YMMV.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
na, xtube.com is miles better
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.
the easiest way to grab the videos is if you are using firefox and the videodownloader plugin from videodownloader.net
Yeah, all the sites are working? Haha. Check out the Youtube homepage: "We're currently putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins. We'll be back later. In the meantime, please enjoy a layman's explanation of our website..." Gremlins, my ass.
...because you never know who you're dealing with.
going by your low UID, I think you might have tried this but still here is what I tried (this worked for me, though FF is required and not flash): use this FF addon to dload the flv file, and then just use "ffmpeg" tool to extract to mpeg format.
http://www.hiphopmusic.com/best_of_youtube/2006/02 /how_to_download_and_save_youtu.html o s-from-youtube.html
.FLV file into something else.
l ahblahblah
http://www.tian.cc/2005/11/how-to-save-flash-vide
These are two of the sites I turned to when I wanted to learn how to download YouTube videos.
Basically, the premise is that you have to change the url to get it to download as a file and then convert it from an
Example:
open "View Page Source" and do a text search for "player2.swf?video_id="
change this:
player2.swf?video_id=b4Knsablahblahblah
to this:
http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=b4Knsab
Then save the file and convert it to, say, AVI. I use CinemaForge for this.
To store YouTube videos on your own machine, get the VideoDownloader extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/. Then go to the page for the YouTube (or Google Video or whatever) page of your choice, and click on their icon. A window pops up and you click on a button to download the actual .flv video. That's in Flash video format, which you'll probably want a player for: http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-pl ayer-updated. Now you can run that (on a Windows machine at least) and play .flv videos from YouTube locally. Voila!
The instant pornotube and the other adult Youtube clones are posted to Slashdot, Youtube dives to 10 trillionth overall.
stuff |
YouTube uses a particular Flash Video Player script which is out there free (Creative Commons) for non-commercial use, and licensable for commercial use. With that, some content management software (done from scratch if you're brave, otherwise just tweak the crap out of one of the zillion CMS packages out there), and an obscene amount of bandwidth, you can have your own YouTube clone up and running in no time.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
There's yet another factor remaining, so I'm going to just wait and see. Maybe Youtube will do just fine without any further incentives.
The factor is: most me-too clones suck. There are a lot of PHBs... err... MBAs out there who seem to think that jumping on a bandwagon means doing the absolute crappiest job, with the cheapest unskilled monkeys off the street. And that you can just make up for that by adding some "features" that are just a PHBs ego trip, as opposed to even trying to understand what the market wants. (Think of all those dot-com era "features" like adding blinking text, or bright blue text on a green background.)
It's not just Google or Ebay. Look at the iPod or iTunes too, at that. (And disclaimer, I'm not even an iPod or Apple fan, but I can still be disgusted with _stupid_ imitation when I see it.)
E.g., you'd think that making yet another HDD based media player would be an easy enough proposition, no? Yet it took half a decade for people to even begin getting their act straight. Some were as big as a freaking brick (I still remember an Archos which was _literally_ as big as a 5" HDD), some had a nightmarish user interface (I'm looking at you, Creative), some insisted on ruining a perfectly good MP3 by re-converting it to their own proprieatry lossy compression in 64kbps (Sony, you suck), etc. And yet paradoxically a lot of them were actually more expensive than a similar capacity iPod. And when they tried adding a feature of their own, even one which might be useful in its own right, like video playback, it came at the expense of being badly implemented _and_ ending up costing more than a good laptop.
Ditto for iTunes. It never ceases to amaze me how many bad ideas people try to cram into copying that... badly. Ranging from the functionality of their program or web site, to the music selection, to some hare-brained ideas like, basically, "I know! People would love to pay for the privilege of indentured servitude to us! I bet everyone just dreams of a service where we hold their whole music collection hostage, and can remotely render it useless if they even think of stopping paying monthly." I mean, seriously, wtf? Who there thought that blatant extortion is a feature?
Those are just two random examples. I could give more, but it's already too long a rant anyway.
The moral is: don't underestimate how crappy a job some people can do when they try to copy something they don't even understand. I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of PHBs out there managed to get even copying Youtube wrong. It may seem like a clear and straightforward idea, that noone can possibly get wrong, but then the same could have been said about everything else which did get copied all wrong.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Do any of these copycats offer actual video downloads
To be fair, IMO the majority of videos on Youtube are cool to watch, but I see no reason to keep copies for eternity.
Unless of course you have an affinity to watching kids dance.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Google wins. Why? They offer the option to download the damn videos.
It's the only way to get the videos on your iPod, PSP, Gameboy (via Play-Yan micro), etc...
I wish, however, that Google would get rid of that "Windows/Mac" option (AVI sucks) and replaced it with MP4 and H264.
Granted, the iPod option is H.264 but it's resized to 320x240 and the PSP is MP4 but it's resized for the PSP's widescreen which is also lower resolution than my computer display.
An added difficulty for YouTube is that it is lacking an emotional hook to differentiate itself from a pure functional service (think iPod). Users visit YouTube not based on any of the brand's perceived values, but on its ability to give them what they want, when and how they want it.
If the website is able to give users what they want, it does create 'perceived value' or positive emotions. If now this value is put in the context of e.g. the YouTube logo, I understand this brand becomes more valueable to these users as well. At least that's what happened to me yesterday after I got to watch some videos of geriatric1927.
By the way, here you can compare YouTube, Google Video and 19 other video search engines. (yes, it's my website)
You're Welcome
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
YouTube, XTube, PornoTube...
The internet really is a series of tubes.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
...even when they are technically public domain.
You know all those Warner and Fleischer cartoons that have been sold for years on crappy VHS tapes at the local 99 Cent Only store? Guess what. Warner gets pissy about some of their later cartoons being posted to YouTube, and then YouTube pulls EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. Even the cartoons that entered the public domain.
YouTube seems to be deathly afraid of suffering the same fate as the old Napster so they have been very quick to pull stuff. They also have a "three strikes" policy about copyright infringement. Three videos get cashiered for possible copyright infringement and your account gets pulled.
John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren & Stimpy, had his YouTube account pulled because he posted short snippets of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons that had passed into the public domain.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.