[videoblogging] YouTube

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 10:05:54 -0800

I don't know the YouTube people and I don't have anything against them personally, but I wish they would change some things about their service. So I'm writing this in the hope that it will generate some back and forth conversation that they might consider. I'm also writing this to try to understand where people who use YouTube are coming from because Ryanne and I are starting to talk about changes and updates to Freevlog and we get lots of "new vlog" emails pointing to YouTube user pages or Blogger blogs full of YouTube video.

So my basic issues with the service as it is right now are:
1. The Terms of Use. Specifically, "For clarity, you shall retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform and otherwise exploit the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube's (and its successor's) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels." The way I read that is you are giving them the right to do whatever they want with your work - even profit from it or licensce it to someone else - without necessarily including you in the deal. Am I misinterpreting this?

2. The other issue I have with YouTube is that videos don't work in an aggregator like FireAnt. I think this is a really important issue. As we get more and more vlog content online and as more people become comfortable using RSS, aggregators will (they are this for me now) be the primary way of interacting with videoblogs for many people.

Personally I would also like to see that logo disappear from everyone's video and for the videos to work on mobile devices but they're not dealbreakers.

If YouTube allowed you to select a license - copyright, creative commons, whatever - and they respected it and if the videos would work in an aggregator we could quit discouraging people from using it. In the end I don't care where people host their media I just wonder why people are choosing YouTube given these issues. So for you YouTube users out there, why do you use it? I know some people like Bill (Lo-Fi STL) were using it as a free Flash transcoder while still offering a quicktime download link and an RSS feed. I can get that. What about others? Is it that you didn't know about the issues I bring up? Or maybe those issues aren't important to you? Or is there something else about the service that gives it value for you?

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Verdi

--
Me: http://michaelverdi.com
R&D: http://evilvlog.com
Learn to videoblog: http://freevlog.org
Learn to videoblog in person: http://node101.org

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