July 20, 2006
There has been so much talk about video hosting sites and business models and web2.0 downfalls that it’s been difficult to keep up.
Pete Cashmore of Mashable recently wrote about Blip.tv’s new funding and questioned the site’s focus:
For starters, Blip.tv’s terminology is questionable - the focus is on creating a “video blog”, and each video clip is referred to as a post. I’m not sure how wise this is: video blogging implies some kind of dedication, while most users of online video sites are quite happy to upload the occasional clip. What’s more, it implies that you actually appear in the video - that’s rarely the case with the most popular viral videos. the comparison of social uploading sites like YouTube, Guba, Metacafe, etc, is deceptive. Cashmore complains about the use of terminology on the Blip.tv site (the use of the term videoblogging) as it implies dedication rather than one-off uploads.
Dedicated videobloggers are, indeed Blip’s target user and it’s a wise move. Videobloggers are notoriously loyal customers and Blip is a big part of the videoblogging community. Vloggers are looking for hosting sites that will not keep their content in walled gardens, releasing it only on branded flash players. We want to use the formats that work best for us and we don’t want our videos to be considered "Blip" videos. We want our videos to be Ours. Blip does this nicely by offering a flash version for those that want it and access to the files in the format we upload as for our own sites. That way, we can make our content available in RSS feeds. Want to have your vlog featured on itunes? With YouTube, it can’t happen. With Blip (and sites like it), it can.
A Blip user is not necessarily a YouTube user (although some people will upload to both places - YouTube to get the audience and Blip to get the control). Blip users are interested in creating their own audience - pointing them back to their own sites - and Blip does this well.
Many people have been wondering about the precarious nature of video hosting sites such as YouTube who receive funding yet, seemingly, have no business model. Reliance on advertising is sketchy and has been the topic of recent articles asking just how long a site can sustain itself on advertising alone. This is a real problem for sites that rely on viewer numbers to sustain their financial growth. Add to the mix the growing number of hosting sites (240 at last count, according the San Francisco Chronicle), and the fight for audience attention is on.
How can these companies expect to compete for advertising dollars? The answer is, they can’t. There will be a lot of closed up shops in the near future and users who have uploaded their content to these sites will lose their content - unless you’re uploading to a site like Blip.tv.
Blip.tv offers back up of content by crossposting to the Internet Archive. The videos are available from Blip in formats that can be downloaded and saved to your hard drive (or anyone else’s). Users are not bound to the site.
Likewise, viewers are not bound to the site and this will be increasingly important as more consumers use RSS and mobile devices. Unlike sites which require viewers to go to a particular website to view content (sometimes, having to join up as well), video offered in RSS readable formats are available in one location (or on one device). While viewers now tend to choose YouTube as a primary viewing site for video to avoid searching multiple sites, hosting sites that use RSS readable formats will not be required destinations in order to view the content.
Blip does not rely on viewership but on content creators. This is a huge difference between Blip and YouTube and, I think, it’s a difference that will stand them in good stead as other hosters fall by the wayside. By placing the focus on the content makers rather than garnering large viewerships and social networks, they avoid the pitfalls of competing for eyes.
Not only relying on individual vloggers, Blip.tv also provides video hosting services to companies that wish to have their own video sites as well as providing website creation and maintainence. The newest of these ventures is the William Shatner DVD Club - a site for sci-fi fans.
You can probably tell that I both use and love Blip.tv. That’s not a disclaimer. It’s a fact.
- Anne
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
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About unmediated
unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
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