Tag Archives: youtube

Dear Vimeo: Please Let Me Skip Ahead

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Attached is the trailer for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, first from YouTube and the second from Vimeo.

With YouTube’s Flash player, you can jump ahead before the video is fully loaded. Vimeo? You cannot.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Another plus for the YouTube player: once the video is fully loaded, it stays cached. Vimeo’s does not.

Oh, and I’m sure there are some people who have fancy Pipes being able to download this so fast that my little experiment fails. I hate/love you.

Why This Is Ridiculously Annoying

These are 1 minute long videos, so it’s not that big of a deal to not be able to jump around. (And who’d want to, these trailers are still awesome.)

But think how annoying it would be for an hour long screencast, interview, or presentation. If I find a lengthy piece of video on Vimeo, I try to find it somewhere else online.

Let’s assume that Flash crashed. (I know, hard to believe.) This forces me to restart the download from the beginning and makes me wait until the stream catches up to where I left off. YouTube? Just jump to where you left off. (It would be cool if it somehow saved where I left off, like Hulu in some cases.)

Also, this is mildly annoying if I’m going up to HD or dropping down to lower quality, since the video has to restart downloading. YouTube handles this a lot more gracefully by upscaling or downscaling and continuing from when you left off.

Skipping Ahead

Please don’t take this the wrong way: Vimeo is a fine video sharing site. I’ve heard great things about the upload process from other developers using Vimeo for the aforementioned uses, and I like the design of their site.

But, come on. There was a time when jumping around a video was a whiz-bang futuristic feature. These days, Vimeo is the exception for not having this feature.

What surprises me is that I can scrub the video, meaning: I can click and hold on the progress bar (Vimeo: What progress bar?), and you’ll see the keyframes of the video. I don’t know much about Flash in general, but I feel like this feature is doable without too much reprocessing of old videos. I’d like to hear from Vimeo on this.

Bonus Rant

I absolutely abhor when I click on the video playing in the YouTube’s Flash player that it opens up to the YouTube page. I mildly dislike that Vimeo’s player doesn’t do anything, except I do like how double clicking the video makes it go into full screen.

I’m sure there’s a blog post somewhere out there, calling out for standard User Interfaces for flash players in general. Maybe native players will win? HTML5 <video> FTW?

Sergey Brin

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Never seen him speak before in anything. I’ve seen pictures with him and Larry Page, but never have I seen him interact with a crowd or hear him speak. He seems very unassuming and amiable guy. Why can’t UIUC get him or Larry Page to come speak here…?

Of course, the next best thing is a YouTube video of him speaking.

I was able to access this through Berkeley‘s new YouTube page. Berkeley is definitely doing something truly wonderful by letting all this content be available. Of course, there were podcasts of courses available, but this is the first time all these video lectures are available for mass consumption.

That, and more students can sleep in if necessary.

One huge takeaway: Take something simple, and take it to a certain scale. Then you have the momentum to build something great.

Need to create something to have some weight to throw around. Hopefully, I’ll be able to bring you some updated stories with HanMeta this weekend.

Robert Greenberg on Donny Deutsch

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Robert Greenberg, CEO and founder of Skechers on one of my most favorite shows, The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.

I asked myself, since all I do on YouTube is waste time, why don’t I look up some really good TV shows that I missed… you know, the ones that will actually help me with the goals I want to achieve in life. (Becoming a Korean Pop star is not one of those goals. I’ll just write off all those Korean Music Videos and Variety Shows off as a means to my goal to become a Korean media mogul…)

The first time I saw Mr. Deutsch’s show was when he was talking with Howard Schultz, founder and CEO of Starbuck’s. Then I saw him on with Bill Gates, Paul Mitchell…. I was hooked.

One of those really motivating videos.

Summary: It’s not what their selling… it’s about the persistence. Don’t ever stop trying. Can’t see the turns at the starting line. Just start running. You’ll get somewhere. Preparation meets opportunity.

For me, I know for a fact what I’ll be doing is going to have to do with the web. I’m not sure why I’m going to start this race with that kind of mindset, but it makes the most sense for me.

However, I need to continue to understand that the web is only the platform. I can choose to sell whatever I want, whether it be a physical product or a service; be it B2B or a consumer-based market; be it advertising-supported or tiered fee-based monetization strategy. This is why this stage of beginning to understand the nature of the web will help me as I start this race.

And with that, I’m all motivated out. Back to reality.

Side note: Why is YouTube out of sync while Google Video isn’t? It’s those l33t hack monkeys at Google… I get so frustrated when I see audio out of sync with the video… someone should program something to fix that timing… but who…?

6 Startup Lessons For The Year 2007

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Read/Write Web – 6 Startup Lessons For The Year 2007

A great list of things I need to follow for the startup. Pretty much puts into paragraph form I’ve been thinking about what I need to do for a startup.

One thing that I disagree on is the idea of the small niche market. The example used in this article was a community of Persian cat owners. Even though there might be a thousand people out there interested in such a site, how incredibly difficult would it be to reach them? Where’s the advertising budget on this one? Don’t even bring up “word-of-mouth” advertising… it’s not like you have a small town of Persian cat owners.

My belief is that there are small markets that actually are too small. Prices on hosting and other costs in creating an application is dropping, but who’s going to know about these tiny TINY applications. (Mind you, I’m talking about social networking sites… B2B is another story… which is where I might consider going into…)

I would add this to the list:

  1. Monetization Where the heck is the money?

YouTube was able to sell for a ridiculous price tag, but they’re still (written in Oct 2006) not that profitable. If they do start advertising pre and post clips, chances are the community that came with that $1.65 billion price tag will start to leave to the likes of dailymotion or metacafe.

I believe that passion to develop the product is the most important thing a startup can have. It’s not always about the money; in fact, it shouldn’t be. It should be to create what the users want, and make the world a better place.

But seriously, someone’s gotta pay for the bandwidth, the coding monkeys… This is why I’m holding off on a lot of my projects until I figure out how to actually monetize on it. And until I learn Ruby on Rails fully. Here’s a lovely reading on the subject.