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Vid.me has announced that they are shutting down on December 15th 2017, saying that they could not find a path to sustainability.
This news should be of concern as content creators have been getting increasingly frustrated with Youtube's algorithms that demonetize their videos and this means they have one less alternative to turn towards.
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Vid.me to Shut Down on Dec 15th 2017
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Silverman's Law:
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:37PM (4 children)
I don't like our culture being under the thumbs of private companies. Google is way too powerful, and not nearly accountable enough.
I confess to mental laziness when it comes to video. Youtube is the first and often the only site I think of when I want video services. (Unless it's porn I'm looking for, then there are a number of ever changing sites for that.) I notice Netflix and their commercial brethren some of the time, but they don't do uploads of homemade video, only downloads of slick, professional shows. To me, a service like Hulu is one of those commercial fee based peddlers I wouldn't even know existed if it wasn't built into smart TVs. Never used them, and not planning to. Apparently they all share a vision of keeping video out of the hands of the masses, encouraging us all to continue being passive consumers, just like the good old days of broadcast TV.
Why can't our public libraries get in on this action? They could, if only we funded them. Store and catalog this vast, growing video collection. Maybe even Youtube doesn't know how all those videos they host are really organized.
At the least, public libraries ought to be allowed to handle digital books! It's a mistake that we just stumbled into giving Google the right to scan everything, for their search engine, but didn't make that a more general right.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:58PM (2 children)
Yes, libraries is a good solution.
Hooktube.
Vimeo isn't all that bad.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday December 05 2017, @10:24PM (1 child)
The big drawback with Vimeo is the $240 per year fee for uploaders of anything that could be considered "Product demos and tutorials" per the commercial content guidelines [vimeo.com]. Taken strictly, this would deem something along the lines of "How to model and rig a face in Blender" as "Product demos and tutorials" of Blender software. There's a carve-out for "an independent production company, artist, or non-profit", but neither the legal FAQ about this section [vimeo.com] nor even the "Tell me more" article [vimeo.com] draws anything close to a bright line about what uploaders qualify as "independent". Or what did I miss?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 06 2017, @03:10AM
Try putting it up and seeing what happens. You can't lose more than you do when utube chooses to demonetize or remove your video.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday December 06 2017, @07:19PM
It's a matter not only of funding, but of time. Technology has simply outstripped our ability to keep up. As tachyon said earlier in the discussion, "hundreds of hours of content are uploaded per minute," and there aren't enough hours in that minute for us (or enough catalogers on duty during that minute) to make a dent. That said, there are those of us who would be willing to casually catalog as we browse in our spare, were it not for:
The lack of cataloging mechanisms and structure: Youtube would have to give us a way to catalog the page that was robust and secure, and we would have to have a way of protecting the catalog from vandalism without descending into the problems that plague other sites (Wikipedia, etc). We would also need to be effective (I report errors in Amazon's listings frequently, and not only do I never get a response, but the corrections are often not implemented, despite being easily verifiable). Are we tagging the pages, building an index, both, or neither?
The lack of standards: Do we use Dewey, LofC, UDC, BISAC? Proprietary, and arguably expensive, at least for individuals or small institutions (I run a small rural library, and we are historically locked into Dewey, but can't afford to pay OCLC's fees for access even to the abridged system). Open Shelves? Open, but still in development. [I am assuming, for the sake of argument, that we are looking for an English-based system, rather than any of the myriad fine classification systems from the non-English library world.] Or do we make space for all of them and either force separate catalogings for each system or make a translator between systems, which brings up the problem of cooperation between proprietary systems. ALso: who will govern the catalog, and who will control the eventual classification system?
The lack of uniformity and accuracy in any system: To offer an example, do I put a video on building and growing food in a solar greenhouse under solar energy, greenhouses, greenhouse operation, greenhouse construction, gardening, or edible crop cultivation? All of them (easier to do with a virtual item online than with a physical volume on the shelf)? Did I miss the one classification that will bring the viewers? What about the host or the creator? They probably need catalog entries as well. At what point do I stop, or do I open it to a wiki-style collaboration and risk malicious vandalism?
Its a complicated thing, and one that the library world discusses frequently. I also think Google/Youtube doesn't know what it has posted, leaving management to algorithms (witness the mess they make of DCMA) and only look at content when it makes a splash in the media.
That's a publisher thing. And an ILS vendor thing. The publishers would rather us not make any e-content available, and saddle us with DRM, restrictions on format and terms of use, and often prohibitive pricing, (such as paying full price for a book that locks out downloads after a certain number of checkouts, but which the library can't remove from the catalog, to force us to re-purchase). The vendors of proprietary library catalog systems, for those of us who are locked into that, make us pay per title (or per a number of titles), which sets a limit to what some library can take on before becoming prohibitively expensive (which is why my little library does not offer Project Gutenberg or Librivox titles in its catalog).
The one benefit of Google's scanning is the proliferation of reprinted public domain books in facsimile, which has allowed us to replace old copies of interesting books on the shelves or to obtain books formerly unavailable. Unfortunately, there are also those who publish poorly OCR'ed versions of the same books, and it is nearly impossible to tell which is which.