Comparing the Tubes : YouTube, Yahoo, MetaCafe, Google, Revver, AOL, DailyMotion, BlipTV, Veoh, Crackle (Sony), Myspace

I produced and uploaded a new into video for CarbonTicker’s Carbon Savings Account through TubeMogul, on November 9 around 10 PM. (Yes, I work (some) Sunday nights…). I then decided to compare the transmission and service quality one can expect from these sites today. I collected data between November 10 and November 12. Must say this exercise has turned out to be a real eye-opener - literally.

Obviously, all of these video sharing services are free, so this is definitely NOT a “gripe-fest.” What you have here is a “quick and dirty” look at the state of web video today, based on the following criteria:

Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes = 10, No = 0
Image clarity:
Download speed:
Ease of obtaining embed code:
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: Yes = 0, No = 10
Points: 0 - 10, 10 being best for image clarity, download speed, and

Here we go:

YouTube upload: Success





Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 5
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 10
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: No - 10

Yahoo upload: Success

Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 7
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 10
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: No - 10

Metacafe upload: Success



Carbon Savings Account from CarbonTicker.com - Celebrity bloopers here


Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 6
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 10
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: Yes - 0

Google upload: Success





Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 6
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 9
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: No - 10

Revver upload: Success ???

Video availability 24 hours after upload: N/A - 0
Image clarity: N/A - 0
Download speed: N/A - 0
Ease of obtaining embed code: N/A - 0
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: N/A - 0

AOL Video upload: Success ???

Video availability 24 hours after upload: N/A - 0
Image clarity: N/A - 0
Download speed: N/A - 0
Ease of obtaining embed code: N/A - 0
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: N/A - 0

DailyMotion upload: Success

Carbon Savings Account from CarbonTicker.com
by itv21

Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 7
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 9
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: No - 10

Blip.tv upload: Success




Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 7
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 9
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: No - 10

Veoh upload: Success



Watch Carbon Savings Account from CarbonTicker.com in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com


Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 7
Download speed: 10
Ease of obtaining embed code: 9
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: No - 10

Crackle (Sony) upload: Success

Video availability 24 hours after upload: Yes - 10
Image clarity: 10
Download speed: 9
Ease of obtaining embed code: 9
Pre-roll ad tagged-on: Yes - 0

MySpace: Failure: error while uploading to site.

Score for each criterium: N/A - 0

Here it is, neatly summarized in our newly inaugurated V-Cast Rating Chart:





Videocast credit: All of the sites listed, except AOL Video, Myspace, and Revver - THANKS!

Is MyStudio the Next Polaroid?

MyStudio is a self-contained high definition (HD) interactive audio/video recording studio designed for installation in shopping malls and other high traffic areas. It promises to deliver you high quality from the proprietary recording system built into this stand-alone booth. MyStudio and its accompanying website, www.mystudio.net, make use of some the world’s leading internet and entertainment properties: the video sharing of YouTube, the social networking aspects of MySpace and FaceBook and talent based contests made popular by American Idol, all in a single entertainment package.





For a $20 fee, you can record an HD video with the ease and convenience only available before to pro filmmakers. Think about creating videos for music, modeling, comedy, dating, job resumes, auditions, personal messages, greetings, and… (no not THAT.) Using Hollywood-style green screen technology, you can:

1. Choose from hundreds of virtual backgrounds
2. Receive a DVD of their session onsite
3. Have your video automatically uploaded to the MyStudio website
4. Share your video from your member profile page
5. Enter your videos into monthly, industry sponsored music, modeling and comedy contests
6. Or send them to talent, dating or job search agencies

MyStudio commenced production of its first 5 studios on April 8, 2008 and expects to install them in strategic locations in Arizona, California, Nevada and New York in the third quarter of 2008. Shortly thereafter we expect to begin a nationwide roll-out in all 50 states followed by international installations.

The first booth is now operating in the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall. The company promises new installations in California, Nevada and New York this quarter, following a nationwide roll-out in all 50 states and overseas.

Cybercast credit: YouTube

MTV Launches MTVMusic.com

MTV has just launched MTVMusic.com, where they offer over 16,000 music videos a la YouTube, but with fewer notices and DMCA takedowns. This, however, is offset by the six separate agreements and privacy statements that must be accepted. Thankfully, at the time of writing the MTV Music website was making this process easier, by having you click off only a single checkbox. With Firefox as your browser, even that’s automated, as it will check the accept box whenever any agreement is viewed.

Here is “Viva Mozilla!” from Rick Astley … not really, but “Never Gonna Give You Up” is close enough for MTV fans.




They also have a set of APIs and development tools that allow you to incorporate their content into your own creations.

Primarily designed for web developers, application builders, and mash-up makers, there's a lot you can do with the MTV Networks Content API. Here are a few sample projects:

• Build a music video gallery of MTV, VH1, CMT or LOGO artists.
• Create an application to send music video dedications to friends on Facebook, MySpace, Flux or just about any other social network.
• Mine our expansive music video archive to create the music application of your dreams.
• Fashion a WordPress plug-in to dynamically pull music videos into blog posts.

Let’s see what you can come up with!

Cybercast credit: MTVMusic

Re Flektor - This Flash Video Creator Tool Rocks - Not!

Flektor is a new Flash-based content mashup tool. You can pull in images from several photo sharing sites like flickr, MySpace, and Photobucket to make slick-looking, embeddable slide shows and videos for your blog, web site, and social network pages. It's a lot like Mixercast, and other media mashup services like RockYou and SplashCast.

Flektor's "Web 2.0" interface is drag-and-drop, which makes for a very short learning curve. To add media to your show, just drag your image and video files down to a timeline at the bottom of the screen, where they can be rearranged or removed at any time. There are also "Flidgets" which can be inserted into your show to add live chat, a live broadcast from your webcam, or special effects like color bars or static. What's really neat is the ability to edit any picture with some easy-to-use sliders that let you do simple, on-the-fly alterations to your photographs--something you'd find on Picnik.

There are nearly 100 transitions, effects, and filters to add a little flair to your show. You can also edit each effect and change its appearance. Out of the many transitions I've seen on some of these Flash editors (Photobucket's Remix in particular), Flektor has some really snappy and good-looking effects.

The main hindrance in using Flektor is how long it takes to communicate with the some of the third-party services. Flickr in particular takes quite a while to sync up photos from various albums. On the upside, the MySpace integration is very simple; just give it a username and it will pull up photos members have uploaded in addition to any images that have been embedded in user comments. Cool! It is also very easy to embed your Flektor player on a number of services, with a handy export page that provides special embedding codes for a dozen services, including Google's Orkut. You can customize the embed code, like specifying the player size.

Here is a "Flek" from abby-normal called Plastic Perspective. Makes you think twice about throwing away your plastic bottles … that is if it loads for you. I let it stream down in the background for some 10 minutes with no success.





Neither could I get the embed code. All this great production capability lost in the shuffle ... NOT a good omen for Flektor!

LonelyGirl Jessica Rose Returns

It was Jessica Rose who had the first Internet only video show hit, way back in 2006.

Lonelygirl15, if you'll recall, was the headline-grabbing video diary of a pretty teenager, later exposed by net detectives as a brilliant, CAA-backed fiction. The lonely girl was by no means alone -- she had a team of writers and producers behind her, and though the door was closed on lonelygirl15, the frontier of "webisodic" video was wide open.

The situation with open frontiers is that the people seeking to colonize them, to borrow a quote from Ms. South Carolina, simply "don't have maps." Which is why, almost two years after lonelygirl15, no Web series has established a viable, let alone profitable homestead. However, more wagons are now arriving. Sony Pictures Television just launched C-Spot:

From Crackle: Roadents: Episode 3

an online comedy channel featuring six sharply produced programs with enough short episodes to fill a 13-week season.

And Jessica Rose is planning a comeback too. The almost-21-year-old actress from New Zealand will soon return to the online world as the star of Blood Cell, a new horror-thriller from Web TV studio 60Frames Entertainment, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez. The show, whose trailer is now up on deadcelldeadfriend.com, follows Rose's character, Julia, as she contends with an unseen murderer who will talk to her only via her fancy photo- and video-enabled cellphone. Which hopefully gets good reception because, as the name of the website suggests, if Julia's signal goes dead, a blond somewhere gets dispatched for good. To build their online audience, C-Spot and 60Frames will "syndicate" their shows on Sony's Crackle (see this and my other previous posts), Hulu, and AOL Video; while 60Frames can be seen on Bebo, Blip.tv, iTunes, MySpace and others. And everyone's on YouTube.

Revenue-sharing deals allow the creators to get a piece of the advertising pie no matter where their shows get watched. 60Frames and Sony Pictures hope to find the answer to the overriding question posed by Web-only tv: In an entertainment world dominated by multi-hour, multi-night programs like American Idol, how do you win repeat viewers with three minute webisode.

Even though more of the big name studios are tempted onto the web, the question still hangs in the air: what will it take for large numbers of us (14-year-olds included) to feel like the computer screen with its blinking and ringing distractions is a good place to watch TV?

Cybercast credit: Crackle

Bebo for Open Media?

Bebo, a large social network that is especially opular in the UK, has launched a sevice dubbed "Open Media" for media companies (that's you and me too, if you create some spiffy videos) to deliver their content directly within the site.

Do you want "The Truth?" Looks like Bebo users do ... at least the U.K. media outfit by that name. I'm not surprised! Here is a VERY original piece from the, appropriately titled "Melting Moms." These people have social conscience.



They allow media companies to use their own video player technology to present videos to Bebo's millions of users, AND let them keep all the revenue from ads within their videos. COOL!

Open Media includes a recommendation feature that shows users what videos their friends like. It also has "channels" where companies can offer only their own videos, with forums, blogs, photos and other features for Bebo users to talk about what they're watching. It already offers a book authors section and a music section.

Video syndication brings in lots of compelling material that keeps people on the site, letting them sell ads that are relevant to what people are already interacting with see.

Bebo claims to have more than 40 million users worldwide, although nobody knows how many of them are active per month. Users spend 40 minutes on the site each day, according to Comscore.

The San Francisco-based company has already signed up a long list of big name partners, including MTV, ESPN, BBC, CBS, Yahoo! and others as well as startup video sites such as Crackle and Ustream.

Notably, Bebo, along with Myspace and many other social networks is a member of the Google-led Open Social project, lets developers build applications that can be implemented easily across social networks. This means video applications for OpenSocial may be introduced to the site which compete with the media companies that are offering videos through Open Media.

Media partners can join Open Media on their own. For partners that don't have a video player or video advertising sales team, Bebo offers its own services.

Cybercast credit: Bebo

Be a TubeMogul for Free!

For about a year now TubeMogul’s beta site has empowered online video publishers, advertisers, and the online video industry with its “Universal Upload” video distribution, publishing, and analytical tools.

While we signed up a good while ago, we have been waiting for them to shed the not-so-distinctive beta status before actually using the service. They seem to be getting close, so here is their pitch, in their own words:





There are a growing number of independent content producers like us, looking to build their brands on the path to stardom. Some you may already now: Average Betty, the comedy chef, magician Brian Brushwood, or Charles Trippy, one of the top video bloggers. Perhaps even more than the internet media companies producing content for the Web, we are hurt by the time spent with day-to-day "technology administration," such as file uploading and viewership measurement. Many of us spend up to 20% of our time in these activities, time away from the creative work needed to produce great content.

So what do you get with a free account?

• One-step upload to a growing number of sites: YouTube, Metacafe, Myspace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, and Brightcove at present.

• Increased reach: With your videos on more sites at no extra effort, your opportunity to gain viewers multiplies. TubeMogul claims that beta users of Universal Upload have witnessed up to 3x more views per video.

• Track Trends & Buzz: Create groups of videos important to you or your industry and track spikes in viewership to identify trends and monitor the pulse of online video viewers.

• Assess Marketing Efforts - assess the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by analyzing spikes and trends in viewership across any range of time.

• Competitive Intelligence - see what's working for your counterparts and competition and compare and contrast viewership trends with your own.

• Share the Intelligence - send and share data and charts with colleagues or friends.

Cybercast credit: TubeMogul and YouTube

Hulu, the anti-YouTube, launches

Hulu, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture designed to compete with video site YouTube, has launched a test version of its site. But it is more of an anti-YouTube than a competitor, because it focuses less on user-generated content.





It comes after months of delay. NBC withdrew its video channel from YouTube last week, and also ditched Apple's iTunes in favor of Amazon's music service. (See my post about Amazon here.)

Hulu will be the exclusive online provider of videos from NBC and News Corp, and it will then syndicate the material to other sites, including AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo, but apparently not YouTube.

Hulu got $100 million in backing from Providence Equity Partners, and arose because of animosity from NBC and News Corp toward YouTube, in part because that site kept hosting vidoes containing copyrighted videos.

NBC had warmed up to YouTube last year, working with the popular video site to promote its vidoes, until Jeff Zucker took over NBC in February. The company then changed its tune, and filed a lawsuit against YouTube.

WeShow the Best Videos Everywhere

As the title says ... but there is more to WeShow than self promotion. The, by now obligatory, "Beta" sign for example....



They actually have live editors who choose what makes it to the site's three sections from YouTube, Metacafe, DailyMotion, MySpace, and many other websites:

WeShow Videos

"Selecting and organizing the best videos worldwide for your entertainment" is the subtitle. You will find really cool stuff here, despite the hype.

WeShow Awards

Okay, they call it the "world's biggest online video contest." Choose your favorite videos among more than 200 channels. There is a new competition every month. Voting your favorite the "WeShow Video of the Month" is cool, if you have a lot of time. Otherwise I don't see the point.

WeShow TV

22 channels, from Autos, through TV. There are four, specifically, nor found on a lot of other sites:

* Commercials
* Games & Toys
* Learning
* People & Vlogs

I can see me suggesting our video commercials and this blog for inclusion. As a member, I'll also receive a weekly selection, defined by me, by email.

Interestingly, the site has British and Brazilian editions, just a click away. Find the flags (in the upper right corner)

Cybercast credit: YouTube. I find this funny.

VEOH TV Bills Itself as a DVR for the Internet

Just what I need more of....



Veoh TV's new (beta, beta, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, ... yes, there are other ancient greek letters too, people) software lets you watch and record Internet video from thousands of video sources from the get-go. You can immerse yourself in full-length episodes from ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and what goes for entertainment on YouTube, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and your corner store video sharing service.

Finding your shows and clips is super easy with the TV-style guide, or via keyword search. You can even use a remote control. (Which one(s)? As you watch it learns what you like and automatically recommends videos to you. Creeps ... make sure your computer is out of sight when your significant other is there or mom is visiting!

Can't wait to lay your eyes on it? Get an invite here.

(It is currently in an invitation only beta, beta, beta.)

P.S. Looks like this outfit never sleeps - and they don't want you too either!

Me.TV Wants You

To start your own .TV website, for only $24.95. And 19.95 for 10 email accounts a year. Not bad! They've also made it as simple as possible these days. You begin by registering the domain name of your choice with them. However, It'd better be your name (full, if you are lucky and it's still available), or, most likely shortened, abbreviated, or contorted into something awful. Whatever is still available, because the best personal and business domain names are gone with the cyber wind. So to speak. You can search for expired domain names here.

They do offer some nifty features though. You can:

• Link all your profiles from other sites, like MySpace or YouTube, on one, easy to remember site name - your own
• Add your favorite videos and photos
• Write a blog. How many blogs can you write???
• And the obligatory social network thing: Invite friends, family and new people, if you're really, REALLY desperate. Just kidding....



Notwithstanding all of the above, I've decided not to use the the site for now. Primarily because our domain registrar, Network Solutions, is having a special deal going till the end of July: $19 to register any domain name extensions, including .tv. First time ever you can get this extension so cheap anywhere. As our hosting plan is good for unlimited domains and corresponding email service, there is no benefit for us to go with Me.TV.

Also, it's not clear at all who is your domain name registrar. Me.tv? Their partner, Whois Privacy Protection, Inc., providing "ID Protect" service for $4.95/year if you decide to use them? What happens if you want to move to another registrar or hosting company? Too many loose ends for my taste ... and pocketbook.

Tickle me Picklish 0.5b

I'm always on the lookout for quick - and preferably clean - Flash video conversion tools. Came across this one today:


Instructions read: Creates great-looking, customizable Flash photo and video galleries. Just drag and drop your photos and videos onto the creator. I did in a flash...and my 2 minute trial and error session ended in error after draggin'-droppin' just one small video file into the image well. Verdict: This incarnation most likely works well with images...do NOT use it with videos!

Created by Geoff Gaudreault, the mastermind behind SlideRoll™, the aptly named photo slideshow maker that you use to create slide shows with your photos. Publish your slideshows on the web, put them on MySpace or YouTube, or e-mail them to friends. Best of all, you can try the Slideshow Creator Demo on Geoff's site free.

VEOH - VE OH? - VidEO H?

I still don't know. They don't tell you. You can, however, do a lot on this website (still in beta):
 
* Broadcast videos of any file size, length, or resolution.
* Auto-syndicate to YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, and P2P Internet TV . 
* Make money through sharing in advertising revenue or pay-per-view.
* Create your own channel with your own uploaded videos and from others.
* Let viewers subscribe to receive new videos as they are released.
* Embed a Flash player on your website. It's like having your own channel.

MT:  They have been in beta at least since late summer, when I first checked them out. How long would anyone want to stay in a testing/fine-tuning mode? Makes me wonder.

Anyway, uploading a 2 minute infomercial, "The College Monkeys' Survival Guide" was quick and painless. Auto-syndication to YouTube etc. was cool. Creating and managing your own channel(s) and subscriptions are also great features, BUT require you to devote a lot of time and effort to produce your own videos. Yes, you can and should add feeds from other sources that complement yours. That's also a very effective way to have your feed syndicated at no cost. At the end, it is still YOUR show. Making it successful will keep you VERY busy.

While the College Monkeys video no longer runs, you can see it here, just for kicks.