B. Mann Consulting

I've been spending a lot of time lately looking at video online. Part of it has been technical, and part of it has been thinking about what is needed and where it is headed. I was involved with IPTV / video over IP back at Nortel, and a lot of things actually haven't changed.

As if video on the Internet wasn't hot enough already, the whole Google buys YouTube has upped the fever pitch to...well, something hotter than fever :P

So, for starters, go and read (and link to!) Kevin Marks' five point plan to save use from Flash video. He included "crappy" in the title, and he's right, but...well, it's what works today.

And that's what will stop us from getting any further. Getting stuck in the "works today" mindset is a bad thing. When you sit down to build something new, you're really never building it for today...you're building it for today AND for the next little while. Somebody has to take a chance on figuring out the future. 

In any case, I very much agree with all of Kevin's points. The phrase "detection script" makes me shiver a bit, and Flash is still the only platform solution if you want one integrated application that has interactivity built into it as well, but for straight up video, we can do better, and should be trying to.

Greg Narain and I had a long discussion with the Jive Live team at BarCamp San Francisco. They take high quality video of all sorts of live events, from art openings to the Pride Parade here in SF, and then post it to their website. In some ways they think of themselves as a daily video newspaper.

We talked about using blogs and RSS and existing video communities to spread their content everywhere, to get traffic going to their site. They currently host their own videos, and Greg and I were of the opinion that as soon as they actually got significant traffic, their video costs would start going through the rough. The difficulties of success when it comes to video content on the Internet today...

A large part of the discussion centered around what we all would and would not do on the Internet, including talking about who subscribes to RSS, uses tags, etc. As I have said time and again, feel free to ignore the small part of the population that uses these tools directly....just stick the functionality on to your site, and the structured nature of RSS, the tag glue, and the automated tools and aggregators that are in place will blast your content around the Internet, which has the net effect of raising your Google ranking, which is really how everyone finds stuff on the Internet today. RSS = higher search ranking, enough said.

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get the original video files back out of YouTube? Wouldn't it be great if you could just upload videos to YouTube and have them automatically appear in iTunes, correctly transcoded as needed?

Yes, I was as surprised as you when I went poking around the YouTube developer section and found no methods to get back the original video files or to do any of these other things I wish for.

I still like Revver's "bolt ads to your videos" business model, and AudioBlog is still my choice for the most flexible commercial service to easily input/host/etc. all your audio and video service (including direct-to-iTunes support).

But where are people putting videos in order to get an audience? YouTube, of course. Let the chorus of "YouTube sucks" begins...until someone else manages to make something that is as popular.

It seems that since the launch of Ourmedia, there are now dozens of places wanting to keep your videos online. You know, trying to be the "Flickr of Video" (aside: could Flickr itself start storing video? I think there are a lot of differences between static photos and video, but I'd love for that team to take a run at it...). Actually, the issue is bigger than just video -- in general, there is a lack of easy ways of both storing and downloading large user created files online. BitTorrent (plug: go get BitTorrent for Dummies, written by my friends Kris Krug and Susie Gardner) helps with download and bandwidth savings, but uploading and storage haven't really been solved. 10MB seems to be the magic number -- anything larger than that is difficult to deal with using a regular web upload, meaning you need to use an uploader application of some kind.

In any case, this is was just meant to be a test post pointing to some personal videos. I completed my test of Revver, which uses a special uploader. I was wondering why my videos weren't showing up, and it turns out there is an extra step of actually bringing them public. This should probably be worked into the uploader at some point, but for now it makes the uploading process very simple.

My public video page for Revver has all the clips I've uploaded (only two so far), both taken on my Canon S1 IS. Here's the thumbnail and click-through link for the heron video: