Videos: YouTube vs. Blip

December 24th, 2007 at 11:30am Sam Permalink

Given our goals with this site, the civic engagement vision, and the concerns Amber expressed in our last meeting, I am re-thinking the idea of sending youth to YouTube to upload their video.

And we’re all in agreement that providing video streaming on this site, at least initially, may not be desirable because it may make the server requirements too expensive.

I’ve done some research on this topic and wanted to share what I have learned. Let me also say that this need not have an impact on cost for web development so let’s not worry about that for now.

This is an awesome explanation of the issues and options:

Prepping and Posting your Video to the Web
Which of the many video sharing sites should you use? The answer really depends on your goals for the video.
http://www.nefilm.com/news/archives/2007/05/web2.htm

I would like to suggest using Blip.tv for the following reasons:

• They don’t take over ownership of the content. From their Terms of Service page: Blip.tv does not claim ownership of the materials you post, upload, input or submit to the Blip.tv site. Full terms here: http://winelibrarytv.blip.tv/tos/
• They don’t advertise their service, send people to other unrelated videos, etc.
• They’re just not YouTube.
• The quality is better and there are more options; for instance videos aren’t limited to 10 minutes in length
• Kids choose their licensing model when using Blip.tv

Also for the site, regardless of the YouTube / Blip.tv issue, I will be using a module that actually makes it possible to embed video content from any of the following (see below) providers by just posting the URL to the video.

Note that we can disable any of these we wish, and the specifics are a little different for each, so I may later want to disable some of these for greater consistency between the various videos on the site. Or if any of you know any reason to disallow any of these, we can do that too.

• YouTube,
• Google,
• Revver,
• MySpace,
• MetaCafe,
• JumpCut,
• BrightCove,
• SevenLoad,
• iFilm,
• Blip.TV,
• Live Video

Thoughts??

Best,
-Samantha

Entry Filed under: PSO website development