Tag Archives: youtube

Some people just don’t like ads »

September 26th, 2012

Giancarlo Ditrapano in an interview with Casey Neistat (aforementioned) regarding advertising on his very popular YouTube channel:

In April, YouTube began allowing all of its the users the option of earning ad revenue from their uploads, a seemingly ideal situation for a guy like Neistat, who self-finances the vast majority of his films and has already logged more than 18 million views. But Neistat refuses to monetize his channel despite the fact that he could seriously inflate his bank account with just a couple of clicks. Those horribly annoying ads are obstacles between the work and the audience, he says, and that gets in the way of what he wants to do.

Even people that make ads don’t like ads. It is a great interview.

(Side note: Check out the scrolling effect on the page.)

Why Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom was “stuck” at 301 views on YouTube »

June 26th, 2012

HBO decided to publish the entire first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s latest TV-series Newsroom to YouTube. When I visited that page on YouTube yesterday I saw that the views were only at 301 and the video had been on YouTube for a good portion of the day already. I thought: “Well, that was a flop.”

But, then I saw this video by YouTube user numberfile explaining while most videos “freeze” at 301 views before continuing a day later. It turns out that YouTube’s analytics team does this on purpose to allow for “fake views” and the worldwide caching phenomenon to play out before they show an accurate count. YouTube considers views “a currency”.

Interesting stuff.

Nilai: Introducing Previews

March 30th, 2012

See also: Introducing Smart Labels.

Nilai has quickly morphed from being a simple list of links to many lists of links each with their own purpose. Using Smart Labels, which are getting smarter with each release, members of Nilai can save links into these lists with a single click.

Sometimes the purpose of saving these links is to watch a video, listen to a bit of audio, or save a link to do something with at a later time. Starting today it is easier than ever to accomplish some of these tasks without ever having to leave Nilai. Previews make it simple to preview links to video, audio, photos, products, or even code. By simply saving a bookmark to the more than 12 supported services Nilai will automatically identify what the link is to and prepare a preview for you.

Let me give you some examples. The most obvious example is video. If you’re like me you don’t have time during your work day to watch YouTube videos that are being circulated throughout the web via Twitter or from my friends via instant messages. So I save these bookmarks to Nilai to watch later. Now, with Previews, Nilai will let me watch the video on my iPad, iPhone, or my Mac without needing to open the YouTube application or website. It looks like this.

For me audio works much the same way. Sometimes I have time to listen to a bit of audio – like on my 90-mile drive to work. For those occasions I prefer to subscribe to a podcast powered by Huffduffer. But, what if I want to listen to a bit of audio in a few hours on my computer or perhaps on my iPad at night in bed? Using Previews Nilai makes it possible to listen to audio from services like Huffduffer and others without needing to subscribe to a podcast or sync with iTunes. Quick, simple.

Video, audio, and photos is just the beginning. Here is a list of the services that Previews supports today: YouTube, Viddler, Flickr, Vimeo, Speaker Deck, Dribbble, Instagram, Twitpic, Skitch, Github’s Gists, Huffduffer. With many, many more on the way. In fact, I’ll tell you straight away that all of the popular recipe sites are next.

I hope you enjoy the new site and Previews.

Some thoughts on Google Chrome removing support for H.264 video playback

January 11th, 2011

I have to say, this makes very little sense. It is the Chrome team’s prerogative to add or remove any feature from their browser that they’d like to but the reasons they’ve given simply do not make much sense. At least not from my desk or the desk’s of others.

John Gruber, as he typically does, does a good job asking the same questions as I would. So I recommend giving his questions to Google a perusal.

However, I’d like to comment his 3rd question to Google. When WebM was announced in May of last year it was said that YouTube would immediately begin to encode their videos in WebM. And, according to YouTube’s HTML5 page, they did exactly that. So part of John’s question is answered. But the other parts – whether or not YouTube will drop support for H.264 or not, and why – remind unanswered so far.

My biggest “huh?” to all of this is Google’s “to foster competition” and “web innovation” statements as to why they are doing this. Gruber is asking why the Flash Player plugin isn’t being removed from being bundled with Google Chrome. I’m wondering how removing support for H.264 video playback is “fostering competition” at all. Isn’t it squashing it?

Think about where the competition really happens for video codecs. Users of the Internet will never decide on a codec. They don’t care. Developers and engineers do. Apple will decide what they will support with their devices, Google with theirs, RIM with theirs, HP, Dell, Toshiba with theirs. My mother could care less if a video is in Flash, H.264, WebM, Theora or any other video codec – she would simply want to view the video and would probably download any software it would take for her to be able to watch it. Do you think she really knows that when she goes to the YouTube application on her iPod Touch that the video that is being delivered is in H.264?

So really, the “competition” doesn’t happen at the user level. It happens at the engineering level. Engineers will pit two codecs against each other and see how they stack up. They’ll decide which to use based on the quality of the codec and then they’ll measure that against the install base for that codec. Right now H.264 is comparable on nearly every level to WebM while the install base for H.264 is enormous in comparison to WebM. So the decision is still pretty clear which codec most engineers would choose for video playback. Unless they are open source zealots that think Apple’s approach to things like H.264, iOS and the App Stores is “closed”.

Now, if Adobe removed H.264 playback from the Flash Player – that’d make some waves. That’d change the game a bit.

All of this being said I really don’t care. Even as a team member for Viddler, a company that has millions of videos that we take care of, I don’t mind allowing the industry to figure some of these things out. I side with the end users and so does Viddler. Viddler will always strive to deliver high-quality video to users the way that the majority of them want it regardless of their device. As of today an overwhelming number of the Internet-connected computers in the world support H.264 playback via Flash Player. So we deliver that. The next step down is H.264 playback via the <video> tag. We deliver that too. If we see a strong need for serving all of our videos via WebM to our users – we’ll deliver that too. We’re already prepared for it. Each of our team member’s have very strong opinions about what is going down in this space – but at the end of the day we’re willing to deliver video for our customers how and where they want it.

Greyson Michael Chance

May 14th, 2010

So: Dude sings a song at a talent show-thingy, puts it up on his YouTube channel (there are a lot of fakes), everyone says he’ll be the next Bieber, Ellen sees it, has him on her show. Stardom awaits.

But wait, did you catch the brilliant move that Ellen is now doing? She puts her chair directly behind the person performing. If the video goes viral (even if it is ripped from her custom branded video player) her attachment to the performance stays in tact. This is pretty genius. Maybe she’s taking tips from Mr. Cowell.

The new NPR.org

July 24th, 2009

NPR.org is getting a facelift on July 27th. As a way to promote the new redesign, allow people to see it, and to give feedback, NPR has created this promotional video and put it on YouTube. The video shows Scott Simon, one of NPR’s hosts, going through the site for the first time and describing some of the new features.

This is absolute genius. Probably the best way I’ve ever seen a new redesign unveiled to a community. They also written a letter from the editor and posted it to the site. On July 27th I’ll be making NPR.org my home page.

Via Khoi Vihn.

“We just posted loads of clips all over the freakin’ place!”

April 1st, 2008

Ever since Viddler announced that Tubemogul now supported Viddler as a distribution point, we’ve been seeing this more and more. People that upload their video to every single video sharing site in order to gain exposure for their show, product, etc. etc.

I get the point. I see the strategy. And, I can’t really blame anyone for spreading their work all over the place in order to get exposure from each of the communities (or audiences as some like to call them) that each of these services have worked very hard to foster.

But is this strategy a good one? Is the benefit great enough to actually recommend this type of marketing? I don’t believe it is, but I’m willing to learn otherwise.

WineLibraryTV is obviously one of the flagship video podcasts that uses the Viddler player. Each episode, since they are embedded on the show’s main Web site, get thousands if not tens of thousands of views. These numbers do not directly reflect the entire audience, since they offer their shows also in Quicktime format for playing within iTunes, iPod, etc. From what I’ve been able to research – the number of people that download the Quicktime format of the show far exceed the number of people that watch the show in the Viddler player.

All of that being said; WineLibraryTV still uploads their videos to YouTube (and maybe other sites too?). Perhaps the strategy here is to, hopefully, get some viewers through YouTube back to their main site. This strategy seems to make sense, but when you look at their YouTube account you see that most episodes only have around 100 views on them. In the realm of WineLibraryTV, that is nothing.

But, some may say “Why not? It doesn’t hurt!”. This might be true, and one could also argue that with services like TubeMogul, it is downright easy. But, one has to ask themselves if they’d rather spread themselves out all over the Internet, or be able to strictly control their brand.

As you know, I’ve been putting together a strategy of “Bringing it all together” wherein I’m starting to take much more control over what I “put out there” and how it is displayed, shared, etc. So perhaps my opinion is skewed and I’m missing something – but really – I feel that if someone’s content is good enough, it won’t matter where they put it. People will come, watch, and interact.

This post was prompted by my seeing this: “We just posted loads of clips all over the freakin’ place!“. When I loaded up the list of places and videos and the links to each, I was amazed (ok, I even LOLed a little). I’m sitting here wondering if this strategy has worked for them or not. Wondering if it was worth the effort or – if it diluted their brand at all.

Maybe I’ll have to do some further research through interviewing people that have done both. Ze Frank comes to mind as someone that has controlled his brand extremely well (in my opinion). Perhaps I’ll ask him and someone who has spread themselves all over to see if either strategy has its own set of benefits.

I’m eager to learn. Opinions?

Project Pedal compares interaction on video sharing sites

March 21st, 2008

Mike, from Project Pedal a video blog about a documentary, after being featured on Viddler by me, does a really great analysis of his experiences on various video sharing sites including YouTube, Blip, Viddler, and Vimeo.

“It’s been interesting though seeing which sites generate the most feedback, interaction, conversations, etc.”

project pedal (blog): Quality vs Quanity

Giving into community pressure

March 3rd, 2008

Have you ever asked yourself why you belong to a particular service on the web? Perhaps you are the type of person that belongs to every single one, and so maybe a better question for you would be, why do you use one more than another?

I recently gave Pownce a spin for a few days and I really like it. Being that I do not use the SMS features on Twitter, I actually like Pownce much better than Twitter. I’m not going to dive into all of the reasons I like Pownce better because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am being forced to use Twitter over Pownce, sorta, because of “community pressure”.

Here is the breakdown of community pressure as I see it. There are a few reasons why we use services that, even though we like a different one, we still use the service.

  1. All of our friends are on the service.
  2. There is more activity on the service.
  3. Everyone uses the service.

All of our friends are on the service. This is a pretty compelling reason to use any service really. If everyone you “know” is using that particular service, you’re bound to check it out and be part of the action. If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with what your friends are doing, and not because you like it more than another service that offers the same features, then you fall into this particular facet of community pressure.

There is more activity on the service. Nearly everyone of my “friends” on Twitter has a Pownce account. Yet, they don’t use it. So, it isn’t a matter of them not knowing about Pownce, it is more about them not actually using the account they created. Why? Probably because everyone that has a Twitter account is using it right now. The activity is contagious and spurs more activity.

I have yet to meet anyone that says that Pownce doesn’t do something that they want it to, or, that it is inferior to Twitter in anyway. (With the exception of SMS, of course.) I believe that if everyone with a Pownce account shifted their daily activities from Twitter to Pownce at the same time, that the reverse could be said for Twitter that is being said now about Pownce, that it is a ghost town. It is all about the activity.

Everyone uses the service. This may not fit with the Twitter / Pownce scenario as well as it does with the YouTube / (everyone else) scenario. Here is a quote from a recent article by Ryan Carson of Carsonified that he wrote about using YouTube to promote your message.

“I’d rather use Vimeo because it’s beautiful, but the truth is there’s a lot more people on YouTube. If you compare 90 views on Vimeo to 10,367 on YouTube there’s just no comparison.” — How to use YouTube to get your message out

Ryan expresses that he actually likes Vimeo more than YouTube, but it doesn’t matter because his goal of reaching as many people as possible is better accomplished using YouTube. I like Pownce more than I do Twitter, but it doesn’t matter, if I want to be part of the conversation I am forced to use Twitter because that is where the conversation is happening.

I’m still not sure what the solution to community pressure is or even if there is one. You can’t fight trends. Being “first to market” is still one of the largest advantages in any industry, period. Even when teams like Pownce and Viddler innovate in ways that previous teams doing similar things have never done, they still end up with the same challenge of gaining market share by “stealing” it away from those that may have it simply because they were first, not because their the best.

Then again, these shifts usually happen over long periods of time. Fads don’t change in one year, but have patterns over decades. The Internet is a different beast, where it seems like these patterns have a much shorter wave-length, but they do change, and it is possible to find niches. I’m looking forward to the point where all services are so wide open, and applications are at the end-points, and which service you use no longer becomes as relevant. But that may yet be a little ways off.

Why do you use the services that you do?

One possible benefit from disabling comments

August 20th, 2007

There has been an ongoing discussion as to whether or not blogs should always have comments enabled to allow its readers to be part of the conversation. I myself firmly believe that each blog post should be thought of as a starting point of, or a response to, a conversation.

Some deal with this issue from an ideological perspective in that they disable comments because they feel that people will behave differently when commenting than they would if they wrote from their own Web sites. Jeremy Keith recently said:

“Choose a random video on YouTube or a random story on Digg, read each and every comment and then tell me that the comments contribute to any kind of community discussion. They are shining examples of antisocial networking.” — Reflection

I feel this is a blanket statement, which has some validity, but I do not believe that YouTube or Digg comments are completely “examples of antisocial networking”.

Sure. Many comments found on Digg threads are a bunch of teenaged boys (the proof is in the statistics) yelling back and forth about whether or not that specific article is digg worthy – but I believe those threads are there exactly for that reason. Should the commentary on Digg be about the article itself? Or should that conversation be reserved for the article’s origin? I believe it is up to the community to decide and it seems like they have.

Not that Jeremy’s point isn’t a valid one. Someone leaving a comment on my blog may indeed be a little looser with their speech than they would if they were responding, like I am right now, from their own Web sites. And if the author of the site is not willing to weed through the comments – then perhaps it is best to disable the comments for that very reason.

But I believe there is a completely different angle to consider.

One of the benefits I see coming from disabling comments is the number of links you end up getting back to your site. It is always nice when someone writes a blog post in response to something you said or wrote and have them link to your site or post as a way to direct people to the rest of the conversation. I’ve been fortunate to have a fair amount of people doing that very thing with some of my posts here on my personal site – and everytime I enjoy it when they do. I wonder, if I disabled comments, would the number of “linkbacks” increase because I was no longer providing a way for the conversation to continue on this site?

In the spring of 2004 I published a poorly written post entitled: “Disabling Comments, The Pros” wherein I spoke about a few sites that were good examples of this “theory” at work. Some of the most popular personal weblogs to date have been those who rarely, if at all, enable comments on their posts. I don’t believe this to be “the formula for creating a popular personal blog” but I believe it may help in some cases.

I leave comments enabled because I suppose I’m not as strict as Jeremy. I don’t care if my readers (all 11 of you) comment in a little different form than they would if they had written an entire response on their sites. So I guess I’m willing to moderate, though I very rarely do, in order to keep the conversation somewhat centralized.

What do you think? Have you ever considered turning off comments? Why? You may answer in the comment form below. ;)

Does Google My Maps allow video embeds?

April 6th, 2007

I’ve been playing around with Google My Maps ever since they were released and I’m still having trouble using embedded videos.

At first I thought that I somehow had to ask Google to whitelist Viddler as a video provider. But since then I’ve tried random YouTube videos to test and I have even had trouble getting those to show up.

According to the FAQ Google “recommends” using “YouTube or Google Video”. It doesn’t necessarily say that you can not use any other services, but for the one’s I’ve tried I’ve not been able to get them to work.

My method for trying to add videos to My Maps is this:

  1. Place placemark on map.
  2. Copy HTML embed code from any video service.
  3. Paste into HTML editing view on My Maps.
  4. Save.

However, it is easy to be fooled because everything works up until step 4. Until you actually save the map, your videos will appear just fine. Once you save, the HTML embed gets “ripped” out.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to 1) get embeds to work? 2) get Viddler whitelisted for My Maps? I would really like to finish my Viddler @ SXSW Google Map.

[tags]google, maps, my maps, video, viddler, youtube, html, embed[/tags]
[slug]mymaps-embed[/slug]

The near future of online video

March 27th, 2007

I’ve decided that I am going to rip through my SXSW notes, pull out the best bits, and try to give my thoughts on them. I tried, unsuccessfully, to write up my panel thoughts into something of some value – but I found that all of the posts I tried to put together were long-winded, boring, and lacked focus.

Ok, on with my point before this too gets unwieldy.

The panelists

The Panelists

In the “Better than 1,000 Words: Video on the Web” panel one of the panelists said: “The problem is finding the good stuff, not that it doesn’t exist” which came from the panel’s thoughts on YouTube. And I completely agree with them. The amount of content on YouTube, and many other large video community sites, is staggering and it is being created and distributed so fast it feels like a runaway train. This has always been the challenge of the web – finding the signal inside of the noise. I believe that smaller communities will emerge, dedicated and focused on a singular idea or genre of video, and it won’t matter what video service you use because all of the content will be automatically aggregated and segregated. Unless of course your content is best suited for these services flagship technologies. We’re already seeing sites and services that do this, and even build ranking systems on top of them – but I believe we’ll start to see much more refinement in this process to where the communities are very, very focused.

For instance, many video sharing services build groups or channels to pool videos together in an attempt to create and foster those communities around a specific topic or genre. And this is fine and dandy, but we’re going to see a lot of these groups and channels branch out into entire sites decided to that topic or genre. Some of them are popping up already, but I really do believe that we’re going to start seeing communities that form around very specific criteria – perhaps even within age groups, sexes, or geographic location. Again, the problem isn’t that the quality doesn’t exist out there – it is just hard to find it unless someone does some work to help separate it out.

So how will this happen? Obviously there has been a lot of development in making it very easy to upload and share video online, and the infrastructures that are behind these services are years ahead of anyone starting on day one. So how do these communities develop? They’ll leverage (Web 2.0 expression borrowed from Andy, thanks Andy) the existing services, their APIs, their features, and their infrastructure and build community specific features ontop of them to allow their respective communities to flourish without constraint.

So I agree that it is difficult to find really good content on some of these larger communities, but I think we’ll stop looking at these larger communities for the content soon – and we’ll look more to the focused communities that still use the same technologies as these services with a little bit of salt, pepper, and (insert your favorite spice name here) to allow the content to shine above all else.

Oh, and even if I wasn’t consulting for Viddler I would say that I believe Viddler will be one of the leaders in this new wave of how video is being shared online. Again, in the near future.

UPDATE: Loren is right, Jeff Jarvis is not the future of online video. :)

[tags]video, online, sharing, viddler, youtube, sxsw, panel, thoughts[/tags]
[slug]near-future-video[/slug]