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Vlogs then and now
When I first started this website way back in 2003 you could probably count the number of video blogs on the web with your fingers and toes. Since there were no websites for broadcasting videos free of charge I had to pay to host everything. It wasn't an easy or cheap thing to do back then, but in almost no time that totally changed. Today, according to MeFeedia, there are over 20,000 vlogs on the net, and a good number of them are being hosted for free on such sites as YouTube, Daily Motion and BlipTV.
Since I'm trying these days to break back into the online video biz, I thought I had better get up to speed with all the various video hosting services that are out there now. I thought that the best way to do this would be to upload a video to each and every video hosting site I could find and compare what features they offer. This has however proven to be a very daunting task indeed. I uploaded some of my videos to the following services to see what the results would be like:
...
YouTube
Webshots
Yahoo Video
MSN Soapbox (Requires you to be part of the beta to view)
MySpace
Blip TV
Google Video
Grouper (Their logo looks oddly similar to my old company GTV.com!)
DailyMotion
Veoh
Brightcove
Metacafe
While there really aren't too many significant differences between most of these hosting services, some have found interesting ways to stand out. Brightcove for example has begun to offer fancy syndication features that let you publish their hosted content onto your own website. While YouTube still doesn't do so, more and more these sites are also beginning to offer revenue sharing between the content creator and the host. I'm sure Google would love to offer this as well on YouTube, but given its trouble with copyright violations they are probably reluctant to complicated matters by introducing revenue sharing. Long story short, it's never been easier for video creators to make money online. Maybe in a future post I'll try to tackle the issue of which video hosting site offers the best deal to content creators.
In the time it took you to read up to here in this blog post, another video site was likely born somewhere else on the net. Trying to upload a video onto each and every one of them seems to me be an almost impossible task to complete. I think I'm not going to try uploading any more videos for now, but instead I'll take a shot at listing as many websites that allow for visitor submitted video as I can find. Here is what I've got so far..
Vimeo
Bolt
Video Egg
Lulu
AOL Uncut Video (Strange name for a family service if you ask me)
Break
EyeSpot
Dabble
Go Fish
Jump Cut
vSocial
Clip Shack
Live Video
TV.com
Liberated Films
eBaum's World
Dave TV
Pixilis.com
Flixya
Muveemix
Lifelogger.com
Divx Stage 6
Reviews videos before posting them live:
iThentic (Both web and wireless content)
iFilm
Atom Films
Revver
Heavy
Videos for cell phones:
Moblr
Umundo (Publish from phone to web)
Shozu
Other video sharing sites that are geared to specific genres:
Visuarios (how-to videos)
Yahoo! Bix (contests)
LonelyPlanet (travel)
Travelistic (travel)
Fliptrack (music videos)
You Are TV (music videos)
Further reading:
Ten Video Sharing Services Compared
Video Hybrid (Index of copyright breaking tv and movies on video sharing sites.. very handy!)
3 comments
Great write up...plenty of online research went into this one...
Hi Jamie, it's great to see your old blog format back! I especially appreciated this post you did on video hosting sites since, as you know, I am a proud bottom-feeder on the great Aomori vlogging food chain (although that chain certainly isn't so great since you and Hugh left).I'm very curious . . . what editing software are you using these days? I finally gave up on Kubuntu and went back to Windows because I couldn't seem to get any decent video editing programs to work on Linux. For now, it's back to Windows Movie Maker and a Keitai Cinema renaissance . . . I hope :P
Looking forward to your new movies! (although I couldn't help but notice that this article promising a return of vlogging to avoidinglife was written on April Fools Day 2007, and the last video you posted was in November 2007 ;) )
Hey Luke!Yes, my return to bloggin has been slow in coming indeed. Every day it seems I say to myself, today is the day I will blog again and somehow that never seems to happen. There is much to blog about as my life has taken quite a few big turns in recent months. Perhaps you've heard about them, or perhaps not. Anyway, I promise a big update soon.. or whenever I get around to it, which may not be that soon. Okay, that's not much of a promise I guess, but it's the best I can do I'm affraid.
Anyway, as for you movie situation. You've really managed to do great things with Windows Movie Maker despite its limits, but if you really feel like taking it to the next level then I'm not sure really what the next best free/cheap solution might be. I know Angela uses something called Magix Movie Edit Pro. I haven't really looked at it too long, but it seemed pretty full featured and might be a good choice for you. In theory if and when I start movie making again I'll probably be using Adobe Premier CS2 or CS3. Premier is mega expensive though, so keep that in mind.
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