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Eh. I think that's a bit of oversimplification. I work in computer graphics. All of the "old school" companies (been around for 30+ years; Pixar, Blue Sky, D

by pfranz 7y ago

Eh. I think that's a bit of oversimplification. I work in computer graphics. All of the "old school" companies (been around for 30+ years; Pixar, Blue Sky, DreamWorks) wrote their own renderer/compositor and other tools because they had to. Today most of those companies have shed (or spun off) most all of their proprietary core software. A very few companies (Sony and Disney) have developed newer generations of rendering software--but both of those have been in business for 20 years. I was never privy to the numbers, but I know carrying the salaries is a huge burden. As a user, proprietary software will often lag off the shelf features by many years because the teams are smaller and they're focusing on things off-the-shelf doesn't do. That's assuming it's well managed. On the user side of video content: I'm not the biggest fan of YouTube, but bespoke websites can often lack features that keep me from sharing content (wont work on phone, preroll gets stuck, can't link to timestamp). SNL used to only host clips on NBC.com which I could never get to work. They started serving them on Hulu, which was only slightly better. YouTube has been significantly better. The focus is always spending time/money on the unique thing your company can provide. In addition, like you're saying, be aware of owning as much as possible of your stack--but spreading yourself too thin or trying to run your business the same way you did 10 years ago can bankrupt you, too.

rchaud 7y ago
I remember watching videos on CollegeHumor.com back in 2008 or so, well before Facebook video. The videos worked fine then. They made the leap to FB because they saw their traffic disappearing as aggregators (FB, Twitter, Reddit) started creating a walled-garden UX discouraging users from leaving their site. Beyond a couple of viral videos, I don't think I've ever watched anything else from them, so I can't say I know what their competitive position was. I do know that the quality of their video platform was not the issue.
- pfranz 7y ago
  But the web isn't static. Viral videos used to be emailed around and show up on sitcoms. There are a lot of sites that worked well on a desktop, but are frustrating or unusable on mobile. That's especially problematic if your audience moves to the walled garden of Facebook. Right around that same time (2008) we were using Linux and YouTube stopped working because we had trouble getting a 64-bit Flash plugin--which is/was heavily used for reference. I remember reading up on the inconsistent video format support between browsers. Flash never worked on iPhones yet YouTube had an app on day one. I'm sure they were pulled to Facebook because of the fake numbers, but I imagine the burden of maintaining their own platform might have pushed them as well. I'm a bit curious if the recent push away from YouTube and building your own platforms will be successful now that a lot of that tech has settled and infrastructure like CDNs and compute is more commoditized.

by pfranz 7y ago

rchaud 7y ago

I remember watching videos on CollegeHumor.com back in 2008 or so, well before Facebook video. The videos worked fine then. They made the leap to FB because they saw their traffic disappearing as aggregators (FB, Twitter, Reddit) started creating a walled-garden UX discouraging users from leaving their site. Beyond a couple of viral videos, I don't think I've ever watched anything else from them, so I can't say I know what their competitive position was. I do know that the quality of their video platform was not the issue.

pfranz 7y ago
But the web isn't static. Viral videos used to be emailed around and show up on sitcoms. There are a lot of sites that worked well on a desktop, but are frustrating or unusable on mobile. That's especially problematic if your audience moves to the walled garden of Facebook. Right around that same time (2008) we were using Linux and YouTube stopped working because we had trouble getting a 64-bit Flash plugin--which is/was heavily used for reference. I remember reading up on the inconsistent video format support between browsers. Flash never worked on iPhones yet YouTube had an app on day one. I'm sure they were pulled to Facebook because of the fake numbers, but I imagine the burden of maintaining their own platform might have pushed them as well. I'm a bit curious if the recent push away from YouTube and building your own platforms will be successful now that a lot of that tech has settled and infrastructure like CDNs and compute is more commoditized.