Review of YouTube, Internet Television and Video Distribution Site
What is YouTube?
YouTube is the most popular internet television or video distribution site on the Internet and currently ranks number 16 on Alexa for most visited websites. YouTube offers anyone with an internet connection the ability to upload video clips and share them with friends, family, and the world, all for free. Users are invited to leave comments, pick favorites, send message to each other and watch videos sorted into subjects or channels. Videos are served with Adobe Flash are viewable on almost any modern computer.
For Content Producers
Pros.
Fast video approval time, they basically approve anything, even copyrighted material (copyrighted material may eventually get pulled or deleted if they catch you). YouTube receives lots of visitors so your videos have the potential to get viewed a TON of times, especially if your video makes it on one of the top viewed, or most discussed video lists for the week, month, or for all time. Each content producer gets their own profile page and unique channel where users can subscribe to your content and be alerted whenever you upload a new video.
Cons.
Limited file size of 100 Megs and a limited video length of 10 minutes. For longer lengths you have to apply for a director’s account and wait for approval. You video is served in Adobe Flash, so the resolution is downgraded. Tons of garbage content so your video may get “lost” in a sea of people lip singing and boot shake videos. Content creators receive no compensation and users can’t download your video to their computer.
For Content Consumers
Pros.
There are lots of videos to watch. Being the 16th most popular site on the internet, you get the largest total amount of videos and video creators. This site is even more popular then Google video. Users can embed videos in their regular blogs, myspace, or on their personal websites. You can subscribe to your favorite content producers and receive notifications whenever they post anything new. They have the most substantial set of video lists I’ve seen on any video distribution site. You can view videos sorted by most recent, most viewed, top rated, most discussed, top favorites, most linked, recently featured, worst rated, by category, by groups and by channel (every user has their own channel). Each one of those lists can further be divided by date range, giving you lots of different ways to sort through the vast amount of clips there.
Cons.
You can’t download the movie clips to your personal computer. You can “save” them to your favorite and create play lists etc, but there is no easy way to say burn them on a DVD and watch the videos on your regular TV. Almost all of the videos are short amateur clips, meaning that most of the content is relatively low quality. So you’ll have to sort through tons and tons of junk to find anything good, not to mention lots of it is just copies of things broadcasted on regular television, so you’ll spend a bunch of time watching tiny net videos which are “old” traditional broadcasting content.
Community:
Lots of comments and discussion, but the site doesn’t feature any long articles or any substantial reviews, so most comments consist of one sentence or two sentences. Their site offers, favorites, Groups, message, inbox, playlists, and user profiles, the standard set of customized community features that are on almost all social networking sites, via it be myspace or any one of it’s many clones.
Comparison with other online video distribution sites:
Youtube has the most content, but if you want to save a copy to your personal computer try Google Video or Veoh. Veoh actually lets you download the video in its original resolution (very nice) and doesn’t contain any length or size limits. As of now, it still consists mostly of the same type of videos as all of the other similar sites though.
Overall Value
Youtube is a fun site and everyone should visit it at least once. Don’t expect it to replace your normal viewing patterns anytime soon and be prepared for juvenile comments, and lots of bad karaoke videos, but there are some interesting clips there and viewing amateur content is surprising addicting. Don’t think YouTube is the end all of Internet tevision though, I would highly recommend you also check out their major competitors (Google Video, Veoh, Yahoo Video, and Addicting Clips just to name a few)
All the community features could potentially be very cool and useful, but currently I don’t think most users will want to take advantage of them, considering the quality of most of the video content. How many people’s vblogs of them singing and dancing do you actually want to subscribe to? This will almost certainly change as the internet television revolution continues.
If you are promoting your own videos make sure to setup an account, but don’t put all your eggs in this basket either, make sure you post your video other places too. YouTube is the most popular, but there are lot of major players in the Internet Television and Video Distribution Market.
Future of YouTube.
The future of YouTube seems to be uncertain, they are currently being sued and have yet to come up with a successful business model, they are for now going to try and sell advertising. Most of the content they carry consists of stuff ripped off from conventional television or amateur user created videos like people’s v blogs, or webcam singing and dancing. The copyright violations have led to a few lawsuits, including one that is currently pending right now. The website repeatedly gets asked to remove content and without viable a revenue model is hard to manage. With bandwidth needs rising rapidly, YouTube’s future is uncertain in its current state. With so much demand and traffic YouTube is definitely not going to go away, but may work substantially different in the very near future.
