Dan Rayburn says it’s time to take stock of YouTube on its 5th anniversary:
In his latest post on YouTube’s blog, talking about YouTube’s fifth birthday, Chad makes all kinds of references to YouTube’s “innovation“, “experience” and how they provide the “revenue models“, “tools” and just about anything else a content owner needs to succeed. The problem with this thinking is that YouTube didn’t contribute to the technology of the industry at all. They haven’t created any codecs, new delivery protocols, created any industry standards or even lead the pack by adding new functionality. While Chad talks about all of YouTube’s “innovation” lets not forget that they don’t even support streaming, don’t support live, only recently starting supporting HD, have a cap on the size of file that can be uploaded and have plenty of other limitations of their service. Show me one feature of YouTube that they lead the market with or is something the rest of the industry has adopted.
And, oh yeah, it doesn’t make any money.
It really is very strange that it has moved so slowly on monetizing for sustainable; Hulu is a good example showing that, while you have to walk some lines very carefully, you can be fairly successful at putting together a conservative but steady income stream with online video. I would have thought that Google would have pushed them into a bit more shape by now, but it just doesn't seem to be happening.
Exactly. I'm actually building a media library for an educational project I hope will grow, but I'm using Vimeo rather than YT because for a very modest annual fee, it provides much more custom features and control over your videos.
I was leaning toward Brightcove until they got greedy last year.