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.'"
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.
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.
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!
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
Wow, great place to... see a bunch of guys... naked :\
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
...just as long as it's not created by ./ users!
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
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.
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.
YouTube, XTube, PornoTube...
The internet really is a series of tubes.
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