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This is the problem with using any privately-owned server as your primary vehicle for hosting your content. By all means, post your videos to YouTube - but plea

by jdormit 10y ago

This is the problem with using any privately-owned server as your primary vehicle for hosting your content. By all means, post your videos to YouTube - but please, host secondary copies yourself, especially now that government censorship seems to be becoming the norm. [Edit] "government censorship seems to be becoming the norm" is perhaps too extreme. Still, the link between the article's evidence of increased censorship and the Trump administration's stance on climate change (and other issues) is concerning.

krapp 10y ago
Censorship aside, content creators should never depend on a single third-party service for hosting their videos, especially if they intend to make a living from that content. Google has already proven willing to remove arbitrary content, delete channels, etc. from Youtube with no apparent rationale or recourse given. I suspect a lot of their recent "glitches" are an attempt to poison the well for public content and to drive potentially copyright infringing channels[0] away in order to eventually turn the service into an entirely subscription based, big media friendly platform. But who knows? The point is, it doesn't matter. Unless you're Sony, you might well wake up tomorrow to find your entire channel erased, and you'll never know why. If your content is important to you, consider hosting it elsehwere, or else offering it as a torrent. It may require a bit more of a technical investment, be less convenient, and even reduce revenue, but in the long run, the more channels for distribution you have, the more you can afford to lose. [0] infringing from the point of view of media conglomerates, who refuse to respect the legitimacy of fair use.
- cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
  This is why MediaGoblin is such an important project. By all means, publish to YouTube, offload different codec/bitrate copies to BitTorrent, place a copy on the Internet Archive, but also run a MediaGoblin server. [0] http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > content creators should never depend on a single third-party service No business should never depend on a single third-party service
naranana 10y ago
>now that government censorship seems to be becoming the norm How is the US government censoring anything?
- jdormit 10y ago
  I was responding to the evidence cited in the article - to be honest, I didn't investigate it too carefully. My statement is probably premature.
jasode 10y ago
>but please, host secondary copies yourself Unfortunately, it's not as simple as asking nicely. Self-hosting costs money especially with huge files like videos. If you have a cheap hosting plan with something like 500 gigabytes of bandwidth and you have a moderately popular video, the web visitors will get a "bandwidth exceeded" error message. Self-hosting videos is a huge costly leap over serving static HTML files. Hosting videos on others' platforms like YouTube/Vimeo/etc gets past the bandwidth constraint.
- jdormit 10y ago
  That's true. An alternative could simply be hosting on multiple platforms - at least that way you'll have a backup plan if a service deletes your content.

by jdormit 10y ago

krapp 10y ago

Censorship aside, content creators should never depend on a single third-party service for hosting their videos, especially if they intend to make a living from that content. Google has already proven willing to remove arbitrary content, delete channels, etc. from Youtube with no apparent rationale or recourse given. I suspect a lot of their recent "glitches" are an attempt to poison the well for public content and to drive potentially copyright infringing channels[0] away in order to eventually turn the service into an entirely subscription based, big media friendly platform. But who knows? The point is, it doesn't matter. Unless you're Sony, you might well wake up tomorrow to find your entire channel erased, and you'll never know why. If your content is important to you, consider hosting it elsehwere, or else offering it as a torrent. It may require a bit more of a technical investment, be less convenient, and even reduce revenue, but in the long run, the more channels for distribution you have, the more you can afford to lose. [0] infringing from the point of view of media conglomerates, who refuse to respect the legitimacy of fair use.

cuckcuckspruce 10y ago
This is why MediaGoblin is such an important project. By all means, publish to YouTube, offload different codec/bitrate copies to BitTorrent, place a copy on the Internet Archive, but also run a MediaGoblin server. [0] http://mediagoblin.org/ http://mediagoblin.org/
CaptSpify 10y ago
> content creators should never depend on a single third-party service No business should never depend on a single third-party service

naranana 10y ago

>now that government censorship seems to be becoming the norm How is the US government censoring anything?

jdormit 10y ago
I was responding to the evidence cited in the article - to be honest, I didn't investigate it too carefully. My statement is probably premature.

jasode 10y ago

>but please, host secondary copies yourself Unfortunately, it's not as simple as asking nicely. Self-hosting costs money especially with huge files like videos. If you have a cheap hosting plan with something like 500 gigabytes of bandwidth and you have a moderately popular video, the web visitors will get a "bandwidth exceeded" error message. Self-hosting videos is a huge costly leap over serving static HTML files. Hosting videos on others' platforms like YouTube/Vimeo/etc gets past the bandwidth constraint.

jdormit 10y ago
That's true. An alternative could simply be hosting on multiple platforms - at least that way you'll have a backup plan if a service deletes your content.