YouTube's Growing Competition 139
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.'"
The best clone (Score:0, Interesting)
Yup, the best Youtube like site.
pornotube (Score:2, Interesting)
Waves goodbye to your bandwidth.
Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Any copycat that didn't copycat flash-suckiness? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
It's not easy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Clones are one thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The best clone (Score:2, Interesting)
State of video technology (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Google video? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Clones are one thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you sure? It a recognised brand for content uploaders, but they tend to be better informed as far as finding somewhere they can upload free video to.
As far as content consumers go, the vast majority of people who visit youtube do so (IMO) via a link from an email. They'll click on that link whether its to youtube or some other generic content hosting site.
I am reminded of iPod killing headlines.
iPod users are shackled to their hardware ipod via their collection of DRM protected mp4s. No such situation exists with youtube.
A better analogy would be altavista, jeeves, etc pre-google.
Anyone can start one. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:State of video technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Anyone can start one. (Score:2, Interesting)
FFMPEG http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ [mplayerhq.hu]: for video conversion
FlowPlayer http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/howto.html [sourceforge.net]: displaying flash video
or Flash Video Player http://jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_Video_Playe
FFMPEG-PHP http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]: If php is used a nice extension for getting screen shots of videos, not necessary though
flvtool2 http://rubyforge.org/projects/flvtool2/ [rubyforge.org]: so you can seek though the created flash file
Then all you need is leverage framework or cms in php, or phython, or something and you are done. (well sort of!)
Re:Clones are one thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Clones are one thing... (Score:2, Interesting)
CNN has been "reporting" on what's going on on YouTube on a fairly regular basis in the afternoon, sometimes more than twice. They're segments that basically consist of hooking a computer up to their video feed with some young guy saying "so as you can really see, YouTube is buzzing over this it's just crazy."
The only time I've seen them do it in a way that it seemed like a good idea, was when they were covering the Israeli-Hezbollah war recently during which they showed some clips taken by YouTube users living in both Israel and Lebanon. It was a cool idea, but unfortunately most of the clips sucked and I'd already seen them on YouTube anyways.
YouTube has been deleting videos left and right... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [blogspot.com] because he posted short snippets of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons that had passed into the public domain.