I watch many more videos online in the new gig than I used to. More likely than not, the videos I want to watch are trapped in wonky, inline pages that simulate TVs or something else weird.
For example, this great conversations between Duane Nickull and Dion Hinchcliffe:
Or, the infamous, Gartner Skewers Schwartz video:
In both cases, you have to use the weird interfaces to view the streaming video. You can’t download it, and there doesn’t seem to be a podcast feed available. More importantly, there aren’t vibrant comments and incoming link communities like you’d see on YouTube.
More Standard, Less Wonky
Which brings up the quick idea: why not start mirroring these videos on YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! Video, or elsewhere? Sure, you guys all want to put ads in there, no problem, just put them in there: people may fast forward through them, but so what? More people will view the video and you’ll become more relevant.
YouTube is a wonky interface of it’s own, but at least it’s more standard than individual publishing/media houses interfaces. Ideally, the publishers would just provide the MP3 versions of the videos as a podcast, but I’m way too jaundiced in this area to think that’ll ever happen.
The Dread WMV
Which brings up another multi-media sore spot: what is the deal with WMV? I mean, how weird can you get? MP3 is a perfectly fine format that works everywhere. Meaning, it’s a great format if you’re trying to win over as many people as possible. For sure, because of the sheer dominance of the Windows platform, there are a lot of WMVs floating around, but, come on? What’s the deal?
The only thing worse than WMV’s, of course, are Apple’s own format, AAC. One could argue that Apple’s current success is predicated on their ability to lace their iTunes Music Store sales with DRM. One day, the market will wake up and realize the scam hidden in DRM’ed formats: you’re not buying music anymore like when you bought you a CD, tape, or record, you’re just renting it until the music-lord wants to up the rent.
Technorati Tags: aac, adobe, apple, microsoft, video, wmv, youtube
YUH!
😉
Get out the RAID for these Roaches!
I agree it would be great to use some of these services. However, I looked at YouTube and it seems to limit videos to 10 minutes and 100MB. This for instance would not allow the Duane Nickull video to be posted. Hopefully someday YouTube will expand since I think it is an interested format for videos.
I agree 100% Cote’! The best part about this on Sys-Con is they have “Web 2.0 Power Panel” discussions locked up in their silly little monitor window graphics. If that’s not late 90’s style I don’t know what is!! Furthermore their player sucks! Generally if you pause it the damn thing won’t play again and you have to refresh the page and start all over again, forcing you to watch their Real World AJAX self promotion! ick.
Sorry it’s Monday morning and I haven’t had enough coffee yet:/
Andre: Indeed, I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve had to re-watch parts of videos because of closing a browser or some other hijinks, the Schwartz one in particular.
Chris: indeed, it’s the roach motel ;>
Ian: you’re right about the limits. I’d hope that they’d at least up those limits for a fee. Either that, or Google or Yahoo video. On the other hand, what I’d really like to see are straight up MP3s. The problem there is paying for bandwidth. It seems to me that LibSyn has figured out a good model for hosting huge files however. If you guys (Eclipse), or anyone else, are looking to host some videos or audio, I’d look into LibSyn: we use them, and so far, so good.
so shouldn't *we* be posting video to youtube then?
James: Indeed, we should…if only we had video 😉
I’ve tried to cook up some execuses for doing some video, and all I have so far are doing some presentations: like Steve’s bottom up marketing or the abstract version of the “Trends in the Database World” presentation I did for Pervasive.
The key is that we need something visual: if we’re just sitting there talking, it’s not really worth the trouble of putting video around it, audio will do just fine.
We could also do the Tim Bray thing and be much more aggresive about video taping people when we’re out at conferences. Audio would be good too.