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.'"

Re:Any copycat that didn't copycat flash-suckiness

[Anonymous Coward]

the easiest way to grab the videos is if you are using firefox and the videodownloader plugin from videodownloader.net

ffmpeg?

[dotpavan]

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 [mozilla.org] to dload the flv file, and then just use "ffmpeg" tool to extract to mpeg format.

How to Download Youtube

[Petskull]

http://www.hiphopmusic.com/best_of_youtube/2006/02 /how_to_download_and_save_youtu.html [hiphopmusic.com]
http://www.tian.cc/2005/11/how-to-save-flash-video s-from-youtube.html [www.tian.cc]

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 .FLV file into something else.

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=b4Knsabl ahblahblah [youtube.com]

Then save the file and convert it to, say, AVI. I use CinemaForge for this.

Re:Any copycat that didn't copycat flash-suckiness

[shawnmchorse]

To store YouTube videos on your own machine, get the VideoDownloader extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/ [mozilla.org]. 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 [martijndevisser.com]. Now you can run that (on a Windows machine at least) and play .flv videos from YouTube locally. Voila!

Google still wins

[Yvan256]

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.

Competition...

[Fanther]

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 [youtube.com].

By the way, here [friskr.com] you can compare YouTube, Google Video and 19 other video search engines. (yes, it's my website)

Re:Any copycat that didn't copycat flash-suckiness

[MrCopilot]

In Addition to the other suggestions I offer youtube-dl chock full of "Cross Platform Command Line Goodness" http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/ [arrakis.es]

You're Welcome

Re:The past is prelude

[owlnation]

People proclaimed the end of EBay with time, but it is as strong as ever...

And they may well be correct...

It is not strong as ever.

Its share price is less than one half of what it was one year ago, there was talk of them buying back shares. Their US, UK and Germany (pretty much their only true strong markets) are stagnating. They are seriously getting their asses kicked in China. Competition in the form of Google and others is a constant threat. Brand Value is decreased due to rising fraud, poor customer support and ever increasing charges. It was widely criticized by analysts for overpaying for Skype, and Skype has lots and lots and lots of strong competition. And to rub salt in the wound, key management such as Jeff Jordan quit.

It is takeover fodder.

No, it is not in a strong position, it could fall hard, and fall fast, and fall soon.

That said, they have always been in a stronger position that YouTube. eBay did make money from the start but it's very hard to see where YouTube is getting its from. It's near impossible to see how it is sustainable going forward. YouTube looks much more like a Dot.com than other so called Web 2.0 companies. I think they will either be history soon enough or sucked into Yahoo, News Corp., or some similar satanic pact.