Internet TV Blog

YouTube founder Jawed Karim gave the following lecture (shown in the video below) about how YouTube became an Online Video giant.

(Via GigaOM.)

David Hellyer tells us about his dejected view about the YouTube partner program. David says….

How do I know i won’t ever make any money out of the partner program? Simple really, I don’t receive anywhere near enough views. Top YouTubers like Nalts, LisaNova and Renetto can reasonably expect to get 10,000 - 20,000 views per video regardless of what it is, with some getting far more! Views is the key thing here. BusinessWeek reported this week that click-throughs on social networking sites are significantly lower than that recieved on other sites (4/10,000 rather than 20/10,000). This is significant because the partnership that YouTube offers is one that shares revenue with you from funds raised by GoogleAdwords. A friend of mine recently started a website and has advertised using GoogleAdwords as they are extremely effective. He pays something in the region of 15p per click-through. This means that even if i were to get Renetto’s views i would only ever recieve at most 60p per video (assuming YouTube passed on the whole 15p to me - which we both know they wouldn’t). Well we all like getting pocket money don’t we… any revenue sharing under the current partner program on offer would definately be pocket money. Except YouTube clearly state in their T&Cs that they will not pay out any money due to partners until it reaches $100.00 (£50.00)… that’s a whole lot of 60p videos!

Kent Nichols (of the Ask a Ninja fame) gave a follow up to this, with some advice for David Hellyer and other Internet TV makers… and even video sharing sites…

[David Hellyer is] a British fellow, so 60p translates to $1.17ish [USD] at today’s exchange rate.

I recently spoke to another partner with a high traffic track record and they said their best quarter in the [YouTube Partner] program has been $500. $500 for three months and a million views. Awesome. (gulp). [That’s sarcasm BTW.]

Now that YouTube is setting the floor for what sharing sites will pay to creators, this give other sites incentives to pay higher fees to creators of popular content.

[Other video sharing sites… you should] Exploit that.

Kent goes on to say….

Other video sites want to cut into YouTube’s marketshare, but how can they compete with YouTube? Cold, hard, cash. MetaCafe’s $5 CPM would’ve netted my friend $5000 for the same million views, not spectacular, but still a tenfold increase. LiveVideo is trying this tactic, we’ll see how that goes. Vuguru, 60Frames, and MySpace are doing it too, although on a much more selective basis.

As a creator you should be always striving to find the best deal for you and your content, and if you can’t get a great deal, stick with the site with street cred and keep looking for a better deal and get better at making content.

Kent’s advice for Internet TV creators is….

Remember to use these [video sharing] sites as much as they are using you. Establish an audience, make a little money, drive as much traffic to your site and use their free bandwidth.

And brand your content as cool and yourself as a creator of cool things.

But then as quickly as possible move on. One show is not a career. It is a stepping stone. Have a vision for yourself and your career and proceed with it. Have new ideas for new shows, and own, own, own as much IP as you possibly can.

And please don’t limit your thinking to just online video. Film, TV, and books all need new cool content and they are in the habit of paying people more than $1.17 for their work.

Good advice for those who are trying to make a living off of Video Blogging, Internet TV, Video Podcasting, Vodcasting, of whatever you want to call it.

YouTube isn’t the only “game in town”. And there’s no reason to be exclusive to just them.

Do what’s best for you, your career, and your business.

Recently there have been a few announcements of Internet TV sites doing HD Video.

Some of the recent High Definition Video announcements came from: Dailymotion and Vimeo. There’s even ways to do HD quality video on YouTube.

Chris Albrecht is arguing that no one wants HD video on the Internet yet. Chris’ article points out that….

AOL pulled the plug on its HD-like offering last year after low user adoption and CBS was hesitant to jump into HD content, believing that audiences don’t care so much about video quality.

Chris’ article also says…

And in an odd way, Dailymotion’s HD offering may prove the naysayers’ points. The Dailymotion blog concedes:

Word to the wise, however: HD is both bandwidth and processor intensive, so a 1.6 Mbps connection is advised (and dual-cores don’t hurt ;).

In an initial test, I had trouble with one video stopping almost every three seconds. A subsequent video worked fine, though there was still some stuttering.

I think that it’s not that users don’t care about video quality, as CBS states. I think it’s that viewesr want their video to start playing instantly and to play smoothly.

But currently, with HD video, the video takes a long time to download and is jittery when it plays. That’s the real reason HD if failing on these video sharing sites.

Let’s face it… HD Video looks better. If viewers could get HD right now without all the slowness and jittery playing, they’d watch it. (Especially those people who are already watching Internet TV on their big screen TV’s.)

The problem is, with these video sharing sites, you can’t really do that yet. The video takes a long time to download and it’s often jittery when it plays. (Which drives viewers crazy.)

If this situation keeps up, we could see a return to Broadcatching!

Not too long ago, before everyone and his pet cat created their own video sharing site… before YouTube, Blip.tv, Revver, Dailymotion, Veoh, and all the rest… people were getting Online Video using a technique called Broadcatching. (Basically… broadcatching involved pre-fetching the video before you want to watch it. So that when you want to watch it, the video was already on your computer’s hard drive, and playing is instant and smooth.)

Broadcatching may see a new surge of popularity because of HD video.

HD video may push people to primarily get their video using Broadcatching software, like: Miro or iTunes.

Ever wanted to create your own video sharing site?! Ever wanted to make your own YouTube-clone?!

This slideshow gives you all the information you need to get started creating your own video sharing site using Free and Open Source software.

| View | Upload your own

Some links from the slide show…

• FFmpeg
• Using Lighttpd, Mplayer/Mencoder and Flvtool2 to Implement Flash Video Streaming
• ffmpeg-php
• Flash Video | Optimizations and Tools
• Live Flash Stream via FFMPEG (via Archive.org)
• OSFlash Page on FFmpeg
• Sönke Rohde’s Tutorial on Transcoding Video with FFmpeg
• Video and Audio Streaming with Flash and Open Source Tools
• Publishing Flash videos with free, open source tools

Jake Ludington (of Jake Ludington’s MediaBlab) pointed out a good video on how to do HD quality video on YouTube.

Jake adds…

Following the steps in the tutorial… You get a pristine looking video at under 1 minute, down to slightly better than YouTube results at 4 minutes. Apparently over 4 minute videos won’t work.

I don’t think you actually need the tool the guy recommends, you just need to know the right command line hashes for FFMPEG (meaning you should be able to use FFMPEGX or WinFF or SUPER). Licensing a copy of the On2 codec probably wouldn’t hurt either.

If you click the More link in his description for the video, he definitely has a bunch of great looking footage posted (relative to the way other YouTube vids look at least).

Tim Street (of the French Maid TV fame) wrote a well put article about why it is important for Internet TV producers to completely control and own their RSS feed, and to have only one video feed.

As Tim says…

It stands to reason that if you make your content available in as many formats as you can that more people will be able to choose what feed they want to subscribe to. Right? Okay, sure but when someone subscribes to your Windows Media feed they are not subscribing to your feed that is featured on the iTunes Store and they don’t count as a subscription for the day that will bring you up in the iTunes rankings. What good does moving up in the iTunes ranking do me? Well if you have content that is emotionally compelling and can really build a large audience it means a lot. It took me over a month to get listed on the iTunes Store and once French Maid TV was featured as new and notable we shot up to number one in 3 days and pick up 20,000 subscribers overnight. Then we were mentioned in Wired Magazine and picked up another 20,000 subscribers. Your feed is very important because it allows you to reach a lot of viewers quickly and the iTunes Store is a great way to get new subscribers and be noticed by business development people and media buyers who are looking for “hot” properties.

Youtube has offered subscribing to their videos for a while but that’s a separate feed from your own feed and now other sites like Revver are offering subscription buttons for feeds as well. That’s all well and good but in the long run where does that get you? You don’t control those feeds. Sure they are another way to get more viewers paying attention to your videos but if these “Partner Feeds” go away you lose all those subscribers.

Having as much information you can about your subscribers that you can share with potential advertisers is very important and moving forward I feel I need to figure out a way to get the kind of info that I have about my subscribers at YouTube on all my delivery channels but beyond that I feel the need to figure out how I can have one feed that I control that is viewable everywhere because I don’t want to dilute my feed.

So what does all that mean…

1. Register your own domain for you Internet TV Show
2. Use that domain to build an Internet TV Site
3. Put your Internet TV video feed under that domain

Kevin Nalts tells us about a top YouTube creator spinning off new video-community site…

One of the most popular YouTube creators, “Renetto,” has been discussing a revolution, and aspirations to create a new website for unmet online-video community.

It’s called RenettoTube.

For the life of me, I’m not quite sure if it is a prank or if it’s faking to be a prank but planning to become real.  (If anyone knows please let me know.)

Kevin lists out some good point on the opportunities and risks in starting a site like this…

Opportunities

• Smaller entity can better meet needs of the smaller subset of YouTube that is primarily participating because of the joy of community.
• If he attracts a lot of big creators, it will be hard to ignore.
• The new site could, in theory, keep lean and more focused.

Risks

• It’s very hard to monetize user-generated content. Renetto will need strong partnerships with online-media buyers, who are still struggling to get their clients to post ads around what they perceive as a risky collection of content.
• Will viewers migrate? It’s a big challenge to get YouTubers to another site. We saw the mess of LiveVideo’s attempt to develop a YouTube clone, and maybe a little more reluctant to migrate.
• The battle against YouTube (with air cover from Google) is not trivial. Renetto and his companions will need to differentiate, focus and outsmart the 100 pound gorilla.