Wednesday 13 January 2010

I repeat myself

I'm going to once again try to stop using YouTube as my main video host. When I realized that the first part of the Bionic Commando walkthrough can't be embedded on my blog, I got pissed off because the company that filed the claim for audiovisual content really doesn't have the rights to anything in the game, and yet they can stop my videos from being viewed in several countries and prevent it from being embedded anywhere. I can't even dispute the claim, as YouTube changed the procedure so that I pretty much have no chance to actually succeed in getting the video back.

A few times in the past I've tried to stop using YouTube as much as I do, but the lack of alternatives has always stopped me. Gamevee was bought by something else, PWNorDIE suddenly deleted all regular user accounts and stopped being a video host, WeGame I recall was crap, DailyMotion is apparently going the YouTube way with both censoring and copyright claims, 5minstudio has the rule for 5 minute videos (even though they transferred a thousand of my 10 minute videos to their site), Blip.tv doesn't allow gameplay videos and some of the smaller video hosts you've probably never even heard of are in partnership with YouTube, meaning they have all videos YouTube has and nothing extra.
I can't even use any kind of free webhosts to host the pure video files, because the ones I know of have the rule that every file must be accessed by some user every 15 days or so and I have no audience that would do that.
I can't even use paid webhosts because I have no money.

All I can do now is stop recording walkthroughs and hope it lasts this time. I don't know why I ever even continued, I've spent a few hundred euros just so I could upload better quality videos, which admittedly was stupid, and I haven't gotten anything worthwhile to show for it. 3000 videos people hardly watch, a hundred regular viewers and a lifetime ban from AdSense for who knows what. Hell, even my daily views dropped by 10,000 a day since I had to get rid of 8 walkthroughs because of copyright claims.

I wouldn't be too frightened if I were one of you 7 people. From past experience I can tell that I have a habit of promising a lot and never delivering, so I probably end up uploading the rest of Bionic Commando before the end of January anyway.
At least while I try to stop myself from recording walkthroughs, I can try doing all the stuff I always talked about in the past, like video reviews and the other 101 great ideas I forgot about.

2 comments:

  1. I feel your pain. Not from a video poster perspective, but from a hoster perspective. I was ..employed.. at a video hosting service, whom I will not name, that was shaping up to be something good. Users were enjoying our features and we had some pretty spectacular things rolling out that would put us even further ahead of the main video hosting services. But the recession hit us at a bad time and so we closed up, sold cheap, and eventually disappeared. :(

    There really are not many good options for what you want to do. The first problem is that it is very difficult to make money on video hosting sites because of the bandwidth fees. Advertising just doesn't cut it. So, without charging users, it becomes difficult to keep these sites going. So, your options get very limited.

    Anyway, at least you will have more time for other things you enjoy.

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  2. You should try Viddler.

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