YouTube — the Flickr of Video?

August 14, 2005 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

YouTube.gifCheck out YouTube, the Palo Alto start-up that launched earlier this year.

Slashdot pointed us to it. YouTube is the latest “folksonomy” website, similar to Flickr, except that it is for sharing and hosting short video clips instead of photos. We liked this clip, “Matt Dances”, of an ex-programmer who dances around the world with an irresistible jig — our favorite was about 3/4 the way through, when a giraffe in Kenya decides to bolt from the craziness. (Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing it out).

Here’s Slashdot on YouTube: Like Flickr, its core functionality is implemented in Flash. Videos can be tagged, searched, discussed, etc through a social network. YouTube has developer APIs, RSS feeds, and the ability to embed videos directly into other web pages. The website was recently profiled on TechCrunch as an up-and-coming Web 2.0 application.

See the bottom of the TechCrunch item for more postings about YouTube. As Rubel notes, there are other sites in this area, including OpenMedia and Our Media Network. And Slashdot’s comments lists many more similar, and different, video sites: PutFile, Vidiac, Vobbo and BroadCast Machine. Not to mention video services of big boys Google and Yahoo, and what they plan to do in the future.

So we have no idea how YouTube plans to make money off this.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • In today's hi-tech age terms, Ytube is considered a late entrant into this space. Not sure what is the problem that they are going to solve considering the already high number of alternatives available in this segment..
    Few other players that are not mentioned in this post are blip.tv & videobloggers.org

    Kavs
  • Anonymous
    Matt

    Try covering some real startups which provide substantial value. Your site does poor job covering local startups.


    Best wishes
  • Anonymous
    hmmmm. youtube seems to be the /most/ accessible site for video hosting right now. blip.tv and videobloggers.org, they don't make it easy for the common person to do the simple thing of uploading a video and sharing it easily. i don't want to have to download a codec for each clip i watch.

    besides, i think video bloggers are a fad that will be fading away. what is really the allure of watching someone telling me about their pets. the problem with videoblogging is that it makes it an imperative to post some video clip ignoring the interest aspect. put another way, videoblogging makes creating a video a job instead of capturing a video of something when something interesting comes along.

    do you really think the wider audience is going to subscribe to 25 different video bloggers and watch 2 minute clips from each of them? or would you think the wider audience would enjoy watching 2 minute clips chosen from a wide, wide field of videos?
  • Alex
    Castpost (http://www.castpost.com) is another Bay Area company in this space. It offers the best tool to add videos (and audios) to existing blogs.
  • Anonymous
    blip.tv is pretty functional, actually, even for a non-hard-core techie type...
  • Craig
    What sets YouTube apart from the others is the embedded player. The videos stream perfectly from within the browser. It is all contained within the script of the site. The start-up has recently expaned its features, now providing users with a line of script to add to ebay, myspace, etc so the selected video will play from within these sites.
  • I wanted to address the second comment that Matt is not covering "true start-ups". While I can't speak for the others, Vidiac is a small 5 man company that is wholely self funded. The founders have all been burned by the dot-bomb, and rather than build the "Next Starbucks" we're just trying to get by with the "Next Corner Coffee Store".

    In that regard I think you'd say we are a "true Start-up" as the company is only 6 months old and we're allready covering our costs. None of us are going to get rich off this, but we just crested 100,000 Unique daily visitors this week so at least we're lucky enough to be enjoying some popularity. 20,000 videos have been uploaded to our servers, and 25 web sites now use your technology, so we're pleased that people are using our stuff.

    Anyhow, watch this market segment, with the convergence of cheap video editing equipment, cheap bandwidth and storage, we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg here! Exciting times for any company in this space and I wish them all good luck.

    Adam Bruce
    Vidiac.com
  • Henry Billows
    I like YouTube. The site functions well, and is VERY intuitive. What I don't like is that the videos are all short form. There is a restriction of 100MB per video, which leads to a sort of Attention Deficit Disorder of video. I have to constantly find new short videos to watch, which makes this good for trailers and Stupid Videos (ala StupidVideos.com), but not good for "real" television-type entertainment.

    I am currently running the Veoh Beta 1.0 ( http://www.veoh.com ) which is a long-form video application. It is a client that works with Mac and PCs, and lets users "publish" and "watch" longer form video. There are NO restrictions on files sizes, so there are lots of full length movies, shows, etc.

    I think that YouTube and Veoh are the two players to watch.
  • wan
    i hope kiroro's video is added
  • What about eyespot.com with its online editing? nifty!