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Magazine publishers with video ambitions see YouTube as safer bet than Facebook
- monksy 8y agoGiven YouTubes weird stances on content moderation, I'm not sure that's a wise bet.
- mozumder 8y agoThere's not enough open-source back-end tools that would allow a site to host and publish videos on their own, without going through a third-party service. Where is the video equivalent to WordPress?
- pishpash 8y agoA site can't do that. You need a CDN and streaming transcoders, etc. Of course if you only have a few viewers then HTML5 will play your self-hosted video files but I don't you think that's what you mean.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- codeinvain 8y agosetting the discovery issue aside, there are SaaS companies like cloudinary.com that take care of all the transcoding / delivery / device matching stuff
- doh 8y agoPublishing is usually not the issue. The delivery is. Besides being it very expensive to re-encode, store and delivery content (in comparison to text), it's incredibly challenging to create good experience for the end user. This is where companies like mux [0] come in the picture, but it's a paid product. YouTube is "free" with a chance to also generate, in some cases, pretty significant revenue stream. [0] https://mux.com https://mux.com
- mozumder 8y agoPublishing is part of the problem. We need to be able to go from Final Cut Pro to web. It has the capability to deliver HTTP Live Streaming, but that's not supported in all browsers. Everything from between "Final Cut Pro" and "Web Browser" needs to be standardized with easy-to-use self-publishing capabilities. (The CDN can take care of the bandwidth)
- doh 8y agoAll browsers (but Opera mini) support video [0]. There are standards all around video. The challenge is not in getting video from Final Cut Pro to a web browser, the challenge is to do it efficiently, economically with a good user experience. CDN is the tiniest part of the whole process. Each video has to be re-encoded based on the device and network capabilities. CDN can the deliver anything anywhere. Also good video player is needed. Even with HLJ.js and Video.js it's a lot of work to put all of this together in a very user friendly way. And then you want to have cross device support and more. Video is just hard. [0] https://caniuse.com/#feat=video https://caniuse.com/#feat=video
- mozumder 8y agoRight, but the whole process has to be optimized. I mean, Final Cut pro can export videos to Facebook and YouTube, but to export on your own media site is where everything starts to fall apart in terms of user experience.
- ninkendo 8y agoDiscovery is the problem. If they’re on YouTube they can show up in people’s recommendation lists, target users with particular history, etc. Hosting your own video means you’re not likely to catch users who are binge watching videos, which I would imagine is a more lucrative demographic for ad dollars.
- krapp 8y agoIsn't hardware (server space, bandwidth and latency) the real problem, with streaming video?
- toasterlovin 8y agoNo, cost for that is constantly reducing. The problem is getting people to pay attention to what you make.
- mozumder 8y agoYou do the same thing people do to get attention for their text blog - the usual publicity approaches.
- toasterlovin 8y agoNot sure if you’ve noticed, but the blogosphere ain’t what it once was.
- mozumder 8y agoPersonal blogs, right. But I'm largely referring to professional media sites like magazines. The world needs a WordPress for video.
- pavs 8y agoConstantly reducing is not the same as less expensive. Independent video streaming is still very expensive, both in hardware cost and bandwidth cost, and if you have a global audience, then you will have to rely on CDN, which for video is not cheap at all. Youtube for the longest time, ran on loss - until recently. Only after Google had reliable penetration all over the globe using their on-premise GGC (aka google CDN) solution, which relies on the user (ISP) bearing the cost of hosting the hardware and the bandwidth that run through it, that now Youtube has the infrastructure to make it profitable. I don't honestly see youtube being seriously challenged. Yes, there might be pockets of competitions - but far far from a serious challenge. Unless an individual producer has very high marketable demand that he can get a premium price from advertisers or charges users per video, I don't see how hosting videos for individuals is profitable. Corporations are a different story, and even they often rely on Youtube.
- prostoalex 8y agoIf the intent is to sell quality ads, advertisers need to see some audience analytics. A smaller publisher is less likely to get people to register, fill in the proper demographic data and stay logged in across all their devices than a large platform.
- JackCh 8y agoYoutube seems to offer a better user experience than facebook for users who don't have an account or aren't signed into an account. I have no data to back this up, but I suspect users with no accounts or users who aren't signed in account for a sizable portion of the youtube audience.
- rhapsodic 8y ago>Youtube seems to offer a better user experience than facebook for users who don't have an account or aren't signed into an account. I have no data to back this up, but I suspect users with no accounts or users who aren't signed in account for a sizable portion of the youtube audience. That's true for me. I'm not on FB, and even publicly-accessible pages will throw up a "Please login" screen after a few seconds. So I see very little FB content. OTOH, I watch plenty of Youtube videos, and I can see, AFAICT, all of the non-paid content even when I'm not logged in.
- slackoverflower 8y agoI definitely would not say it is a sizable portion. I'd say it is infact a minority of Youtube's audience. Their CEO revealed they have 1.8b logged in users [1] every month watching videos. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17317274/youtube-1-8-billion-logged-in-monthly-users-brandcast-2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/3/17317274/youtube-1-8-billi...
- kgwgk 8y agoBut do they log in consistently? I log in by mistake every now and then, but I use it without being logged in 99.9% of the time.
- cheeze 8y agoThis isn't a huge percentage of the time for me, but I often use a device that isn't logged into anything because it's using the android builtin browser, someone elses computer, etc. Not having to care about logging in is a benefit.
- 8y ago
- chiefalchemist 8y ago"...the shows are weekly, focus on evergreen topics and run up to eight minutes per episode..." That's __obviously__ not a good fit for FB. Nothing more. Nothing less. To say anything more means someone has an ax to grind. Perhaps the title oft his article should be: "Full Disclosure; Google Paid Me to Write This"?
- matte_black 8y agoMost likely someone who feels raw about FBs stock price on its way to full recovery despite the recent scandal.
- jadedhacker 8y agoI don't think I understand. Is it the 8 min part that isn't a good fit for FB?
- chiefalchemist 8y agoHow many people go to FB looking for "long form" evergreen video content? If you do, how easy it to search for? One is a social network. The other a media platform. The expectations and usage of each is different. Put another way...you host it on YT and market it on FB, __not__ the other way around. For a brand to pick the best platform for their __particular__ content is not new and noteworthy. That is, it's not news. It's fluff. It's clickbait.
- shanghaiaway 8y agoSo many conspiracy theorist snowflakes in tech.
- kumarvvr 8y agoI really hate these news sites that overload their sites with graphics like images and videos. I long for simple websites that dont have auto playing videos that are always on some corner even when scrolled down.
- prostoalex 8y agoSafari on mobile supports defaulting to Reading Mode for domains.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoIf you're okay with more of a microfiche-style experience: https://www.pressreader.com/ https://www.pressreader.com/ Not sure if you can kill photos— but they're pretty essential to journalism.
- kumarvvr 8y agoMy point is countless hours of dev time, resources and infrastructure is wasted on what is obviously a very bad design. Making a bad design, then overcoming the bad design with another piece of software is pure wastage of valuable resources. It's really sad. UX design does not get the authority it deserves.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoSome publishers do better than others in that department. I can agree (from experience) that many run fast away from any dev work except for new plugins that return more data to the marketing and sales departments who come back with more requests for beating as blockers and direct ad insertion and the rest of it. It was very frustrating being somebody who knew how to build a better experience and see it rejected as bad business. Edit: they have UX teams but they don’t leverage them because of a goofy allotment of any sanctioned development work to CAPEX which they never want to spend because they often have little of that but tons of OPEX. It drives the “just get it done” part of my mind crazy.
- deleted 8y ago
- tomkinson 8y agoWayyyyyyy safer, and yet still not.
- katzgrau 8y agoI just don't see smaller magazine publishers sustaining the production of video. It's extremely high cost relative to other content and they don't have the traffic or niche audience required to gather the ad revenue to support it.
- richsherwood 8y agoIt’s getting cheaper and cheaper to produce videos these days though. We’re kind of in the place that graphic design was in 10 years ago. As the equipment gets better, software more powerful, and generations of younger folks with substantial knowledge in the subject, the costs are going to go way down.
- toasterlovin 8y agoI’d say we’re at the end of the cost reduction curve. Capital requirements for video production have been minimal for a while. Costs are overwhelmingly people. People don’t get cheaper.
- mistermann 8y agoWith the number of totally independent content producers on YouTube with extremely high production quality (often indistinguishable from professional TV shows), I honestly don't think cost/people is a big factor anymore, at all.
- katzgrau 8y agoBut a publisher is paying people to produce the content - so I'm saying after the planning, shooting and producing, the cost at probably a few thousand for a publisher. Supporting that with video ad Rev is really, really hard if you're like the typical online magazine that doesn't have a look at T of scale.
- mistermann 8y ago> after the planning, shooting and producing, the cost at probably a few thousand for a publisher. There are all sorts of YouTube content creators who do everything for their channel, had no noteworthy background in any of it, and turn out several videos a week with broadcast TV levels of quality, in addition to holding down full time regular jobs. You could spend several thousand per episode, but you no longer have* to. I agree though, covering these now minimal costs with ad revenue is something else entirely.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoWorking for a major Canadian multimedia company (including some reputable magazines). Brightcove is pretty much at the core of it. Youtube is a sometimes, or just another endpoint. Facebook Live was used a few times but I haven't heard much from that lately.
- stochastic_monk 8y agoIt got a lot of press for live streaming literal murders, rapes, and child molestation. I haven’t heard anything about it since, but, then again, I don’t use Facebook.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoRight. I forgot about all that already. Good lord.
- cheeze 8y agoI've always seen Youtube as much higher quality than facebook. More than being accessible to everybody regardless of being logged in or not, their players have always been top notch for me. I've always associated Facebook videos with low quality content that I see scrolling through a newsfeed, and FB video has always been noticeably buggier than Youtube. The focus of Youtube is video whereas video is just another feature of FB. If I want to binge something in the background or watch AvE tear apart power tools (seriously, he's awesome) I go to Youtube. I've never gone to Facebook when I wanted to watch video content.
- joe_the_user 8y agoIt depends on how you measure things. Youtube is a higher-quality video content site. It has lots of experience serving this type of content. But as a social network, Youtube is gutter-quality, the worst of the worst. The kind of social network whose more disgruntled content providers are literally trying to murder the people running the site and whose comment section is infamous for being something like the most awful part of Internet.
- mattnewton 8y agoI feel like the reference to the San Bruno shooting is detracting from your point. There was one incident still under investigation, and your commment pluralized and generalized from that. I agree with the sentiment though, I remember during the 2016 election debates in the US, watching the YouTube live comments fill up with Unicode-art swasticas and depictions of people with turbans and bombs being shot at from behind a wall, and just incoherient expletives and slurs peppered in between.
- losteric 8y agoYoutube seems worse because the comments are public and global... but same folks are posting the same bigotry on Facebook.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
- ggg9990 8y agoOne thing is that various video domains have almost expected levels of quality. I assume that any video link to Facebook.com is likely garbage, and I almost always click a link to Vimeo.com, even though of course any file could be uploaded to either domain.
- musage 8y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/8jj4f8/i_made_a_bot_on_youtube_to_run_for_24_hours_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/comments/8jj4f8/i_made_a_b... Any updates on Disney working "closely" with YouTube to fix this, but somehow fixing fuck all and not even warning people about it? Hmm?