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Show HN: Bitcast.io – A marketplace for web development tutorials
- cbhl 13y agoI don't understand why y'all chose the screencasts niche as opposed to, say, music education. What's your reasoning, and how you plan on differentiating yourself for content creators from, say, a YouTube Partner network?
- ngoel36 13y agoHey, one of the co-founders here. No particular reason - all four of us are web developers, and we quite simply, we each badly wanted a platform for web development screencasts to exist. We differentiate ourself from YT in a few big ways. The first is our focus on developers. A YT Partner can post videos exclusively on development, but it's obviously impossible to include code markdown or have meaningful software-related tags. We also feature the ability to offer both free and paid videos; it takes a lot of time to make quality screencasts, and many of the developers we've spoken to have found YT insufficient for monetizing their content.
- josephjrobison 13y agoI think this is an excellent idea and will do really well. If you have developers who can walk us through real projects that can go live in the wild it will do really well. This can be like the Themeforest for screencasts. This will supplement nicely with Treehouse/Code School/Net Tuts videos because it looks like you guys will show how to do some of the rarer or less widespread tips and tricks that the big guys usually don't cover. Good luck!
- zhs 13y agoThanks Joseph, having developers release screencasts where they work on actual projects is definitely a big goal of ours. People often underestimate how much you can learn by watching someone who's an expert in something.
- cbhl 13y agoCool, building for yourself as a customer. Best of luck!
- bdcravens 13y agoOff the top of my head, I see screencasts that are available elsewhere. They are merely aggregating, which is great - in a world filled with app stores and iTunes, discovery of a given horizontal should be more than a Google search or a retweet.
- ngoel36 13y agoThanks! Right now we've done a lot of aggregating, and we've partnered up with some great screencasters to share their content on our platform. That being said, we have a lot of exclusive content in our pipeline, so look forward to seeing a lot of new stuff soon.
- avolcano 13y agoMassive feature missing: last updated date. I would NEVER buy a screencast, tutorial, or anything on web development without knowing EXACTLY when it was last updated. For example, the paid Ember screencasts claim to go over the Ember router - how do I know whether it was the old beta router, the RC1 router, or the RC6 "Promise-ified" router?
- joshuahornby 13y agoThis may get shot down, but why no PHP? I know its not cool and trendy but it works dam well.
- zhs 13y agoHey Josh, Zach here (one of the co-founders). We personally don't use PHP very much but we're more than open to hosting those screencasts. If you have any recommendations or would like to post some yourself please let us know.
- joshuahornby 13y agoI am still learning my self hence why I would love to see some screencasts. I am about to start a year long placement where PHP is the language of choice so maybe in 6 months I may do something for your site. Great work so far.
- notok22 13y agoAlso adding Go(http://golang.org http://golang.org) would be great.
- zhs 13y agoWe're definitely planning on adding Go. Do you have any screencasts that you enjoy in particular that'd you'd like us to add?
- bluetidepro 13y agoIs this done by the people at Treehouse [1]? It looks like the design/layout is very much inspired by them, at the least. If they are not associated to Treehouse, they may need to think about making their design a bit more unique, because some might try to call that out as a rip. [1] http://teamtreehouse.com/ http://teamtreehouse.com/
- NikolaTesla 13y agoI don't see it. Looks like a fairly typical website template.
- zhs 13y agoThanks Tesla, and thank you for Alternating Current.
- NikolaTesla 13y agoThanks for the AC shout out, so few appreciate me anymore.
- ThomasEdison 13y agoDC rules forever!
- ngoel36 13y agoAlthough we're all big fans of Treehouse, we're definitely not associated with them. I'm sorry you feel that it could be called out as a rip, but our in-house designer develops everything from scratch. I think it's safe to say that both landing pages are pretty typical.
- bluetidepro 13y agoI think it's just things like: -The color scheme: http://bluetide.pro/DWYp/5BcKpQnl http://bluetide.pro/DWYp/5BcKpQnl -The hexagon cut for images/icons: http://bluetide.pro/VZYM/3VbvSuxF http://bluetide.pro/VZYM/3VbvSuxF , but then using circles for avatars: http://bluetide.pro/LOFC/4Np9xUmq http://bluetide.pro/LOFC/4Np9xUmq -The wide button styles: http://bluetide.pro/yzft/L49wdKTr http://bluetide.pro/yzft/L49wdKTr And yes, these are common things in general, but I think they stick out more to me because the products are in the same realm. Just some food for thought! :) EDIT: And don't get me wrong, I don't mean this in a bad way. It's just something to be aware of that I noticed. I really like the idea of the product, in general! Good luck with it! :)
- stephanos2k 13y agoOne thing I learned from watching MicroConf presentations online: Make it about them (the users) not you. The title reads "We Love Screencasts". According to the marketing gurus this should instead focus on your audience (because we only care about ourselves, you know). Oh and it seems the favicon has an odd white background :-? Other than that, the site looks extremely sleek :)
- ngoel36 13y agoStephanos2k, thanks for the feedback! We definitely weren't trying to make it about ourselves but instead demonstrate our passion for screencasts and the screencasting community. That is, after all, why we created Bitcast. We're always looking to optimize our front page though, so we'll absolutely take your feedback into consideration.
- sergiotapia 13y agoYou guys really need a "Date Published" field on each screencast and a "Date Updated" if it has been updated. I was about to buy the Backbone + Rails bundle but I was apprehensive because what if it's really outdated? Lynda.com displays a publish date, it's useful.
- zhs 13y agoWe overlooked that but completely agree, and we're adding that ASAP. FYI, the Backbone + Rails videos were produced recently and are very up to date – I went through all of them myself.
- epa 13y agoThis makes me sick. Web development tutorials should be free and open for the sake of learning and spreading information (as per the last 10 years).
- bdcravens 13y agoWhy? There's plenty of successful pro screencasters: RailsCasts, PeepCode, Destroy all Software, etc. Some have free content, like RailsCasts and Ruby Tapas. Producing a decent 15 minute screencast takes hours of preparation. At decent billable rates, that means hundreds of dollars per episode. Plus these are videos with real value, that if they do their job, allowing the watcher to earn tens of thousands of dollars more per year. As for free tutorials, you're a Google search away an essentially limitless library (many of which were written by some of the screencasters that make you sick). I've learned from free material, but I also feel that that an on-point screencast is worth a few dollars. That's why I'm more than happy to pay for RailsCast, Tapas, CodeSchool, and more, every month. As for "should be free", I really don't know where you get this. In a world where information is a scarce resource, perhaps. That's not the world we live in, and I hope all that can add value all the best in selling their expertise.
- ngoel36 13y agoThanks bdcraven, we completely agree. Even before the rise in screencast popularity, writing a good book on programming took just as much effort, if not more. Authors certainly didn't give those away for free either.
- ngoel36 13y agoEpa, thanks for the feedback. We are in full support of the fact that web development tutorials need to be open and easily accessible to all. And around half of the content on our site is completely free. Most quality content, however, takes a very big time investment to produce properly, and it is often impossible to recuperate that investment through advertising revenue alone. The process is anything but easy, quick, or cheap (http://www.backbonerails.com/blog/how-to-create-compelling-technical-screencasts http://www.backbonerails.com/blog/how-to-create-compelling-t...). Take Ryan Bates for example, I would be hard-pressed to find a good Rails developer who hasn't picked up a thing or two from Railscasts. And $9/month is nothing compared to the wealth of knowledge one can get for that price. We simply want to enable more developers like Ryan to produce quality educational content and monetize it, if they so wish, on Bitcast.
- izztmzzt 13y agoShould be renamed "A marketplace for Ruby on Rails tutorials".
- ngoel36 13y agoIzztmzzt, I'll admit, we do love Rails :). Naturally, a good percentage of our initial content turned out to be Rails centered, but the large majority of our content library is not. We're looking to expand into all of the areas that our users are interested in, which topics would you most like to see?
- acmecorps 13y agoI'm a rails and ios developer myself. I'd love to hear screencasts on building webapps using Go. If u have this, then take my money.
- ngoel36 13y agoWe're hard at work on it! Who are your favorite Go screencasters currently?
- izztmzzt 13y agoWell now, this is good news. Looking forward to seeing what is posted in the "Python" department!
- Nodex 13y agoYou have some really BAD quality videos on there. Please fix.
- earlz 13y agoWhy are people willing to pay for screencasts(of any quality), but NEVER for a well written article over the same thing. I personally hate trying to learn things from videos. I can't search it. I can't copy and paste code from it. I can't skim over it. Later review and skimming ahead is lousy, at best, impossible at worst. The only thing screencasts have going for them is that they are (in general) easier to create than a well written article. The difference for readers/viewers though is substantial.
- wikwocket 13y agoWe do pay for well-written articles. They're called books. Also, video can be a powerful tool. The combination of seeing a thing or a process, hearing a narration about it, and observing another human being interact with it, provides more bandwidth across a wider spectrum of our senses. For some people, it is easier and faster to learn this way, in the same way that it is easier to learn from a tutor than from a textbook.
- zhs 13y agoAmen.
- ngoel36 13y agoEarlz, I don't think that people aren't willing to pay for a well written article. Take a look at self-published Amazon Kindle e-books. Some of them are as short as 20 pages and as cheap as 99 cents. And many have been insanely successful. But that's besides the point. In general, you're right. A lot of screencasts out there suck. And as you clearly exemplify, a lot of people learn better from text than video. Which is precisely why screencasts need their own platform independent from a pure video hosting service like YouTube. We support full Github-style markdown and code syntax highlighting, and we encourage all content producers to pair their videos with annotations that are sufficient enough to stand alone (similar to what Ryan Bates does with Railscasts/AsciiCasts). And we think that a unified platform which sets that standard will help make it the norm rather than an exception.
- shire 13y agoI really like this, please make more videos more towards Python and Javascript. I would love some PHP but that's asking for to much.
- ryanhandby 13y agoI am actively trying to watch some videos on Bitcast at the moment. I love it by the way great concept and great way of setting it all out although I am hitting a wall with a 404 when trying to view a video. GET https://data.sublimevideo.net/js/kcvkz080-beta.js https://data.sublimevideo.net/js/kcvkz080-beta.js 404 (Not Found) This makes it quite hard to watch the videos.
- ryanhandby 13y agoThis was the first video in the AngularJS bundle FYI.