Random bitching about YouTube
29-Nov-06
Why I don’t like or use YouTube:
Every time I open a YouTube video on my PowerBook G4, it’s choppy, grainy, and even if I pause and wait for it to download the whole video, it stays that way throughout the whole video. Why? Because YouTube wants people to use their proprietary viewer to watch videos, or at least to watch them 100% on the YouTube website with YouTube’s ads. Also, when I go to YouTube I find the same video “owned” by many different people– who really created that work?
Compare this to putting your videos on your own web server or on blip.tv, something that’s easy to do, and having some control over the quality of the video when people actually manage to watch it. People try to tell me that degrading the file and switching it into a format that looks like crap (Flash) isn’t making a “derivative” work, but it definitely changes the work. All the choppiness and poor video quality really speaks poorly of one’s own talents.
The poor quality is one of the main things I’m asked about when I talk about my book, by the way. All I can do is shrug and explain that it’s a limitation of the site, and they should consider switching to another site if they care about quality.
A fellow videoblogger put it well: $1.65 billion, and not a cent of it went to content creators. Says something, doesn’t it?