Amazon Targets YouTube with New Online Video Posting Service | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Targets YouTube with New Online Video Posting Service

bloomberg.com

90 pointspetethomas132 comments

I run a popular YouTube educational channel (in the top 10 for it's niche) and have had some serious issues with YouTube that have nearly made me quit.

I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email. I lost about $1500 in revenues which was never returned.

Beyond that, YouTube is taking a ~50% cut of your ad revenue AND any donation revenue on the site which seems pretty extreme. They also don't do good when it comes to new content discovery, as the YT search promotes mostly popular content (basically, bad for new creators).

YT recently made a change where they escrow revenue during disputes as opposed to just turning it off.

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2016/04/improving-content...

True, it's pretty recent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0a6K1NiUY2s

Do you have information about the 50% cut of donations?

This page says that for non-profits, Youtube actually pays the fees themselves so 100% of the money goes to the target.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6327868?hl=en

And for Fan Funding it is a 5% + $0.21 fee.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6052077?hl=en

They are probably confusing YouTube with Twitch

>I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email.

I have a feeling no (big) video hosting site will be immune to this. This is a legal problem not a technology problem.

>Beyond that, YouTube is taking a ~50% cut of your ad revenue AND any donation revenue on the site which seems pretty extreme.

Yeah, I'm not sure what a 'fair' split is, but hosting and serving video is heavier than apps, and app-store collect 30% of revenue. With more competition that ratio may change in favor of content creators.

>They also don't do good when it comes to new content discovery, as the YT search promotes mostly popular content

Again, I think this is less YouTube and more the nature of the beast. You're in a typical long-tail market - where you compete with millions of other creators, with low barriers to entry. No search or discovery is going to get it right.

Google is notorious for not having 'human" customer service though. Their philosophy of automating everything means flagged videos will get removed, and then the content creator get directed to a community forum to vent.

This has happened to me before too.

Flagged videos aren't removed automatically; a human reviews them first. It would probably be better if it was more automated, because humans make mistakes and machines don't get tired after a long day of reviewing videos.

"YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and videos that violate our Community Guidelines are removed from YouTube.

...

Flagged videos are not automatically taken down by the flagging system. If a video doesn't violate our guidelines, no amount of flagging will change that, and the video will stay on the site."

Source: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802027?hl=en

> >I had a young (pre-teen) boy who filed copyright claims on several of my tutorials, and they where taken down instantly and took months to resolve via email. I have a feeling no (big) video hosting site will be immune to this. This is a legal problem not a technology problem.

It's a basic support problem in the case of youtube. They only just started a program to actually give support to content creators.

Aren't some of those issues related to the DMCA copyright laws so any other company would have to conform to them? Also, I think Twitch(which is owned by Amazon) has the same 50% cut as youtube so I doubt whatever new streaming service Amazon comes up with will have a different ratio.

YT claim and contentID system is not DMCA. It is entirely voluntary and governed by googles 'whatever the f we want' rules.

If you are popular on Twitch you can get at least 60/40 split.

They've finally revised their policies about how those copyright claims work revenue-wise, but it took them far too long.

Only in cases where the video remains online. It wouldn't apply to the OP's case as no revenue was being generated at all.

They've added escrow for situations where the video remains viewable, but ad revenue is claimed.

OP says his video was struck from the site entirely. Escrow wouldn't have helped him.

Was the copyright claim against you a joke?

No the kid had similar tutorial videos and I think he wanted to be above me in search.

Were there any repercussions for his account?

Doubtful. YouTube doesn't punish false claims. It's one of the reasons content creators are upset with YouTube.

Well, the law does not allow YouTube to "punish" false DMCA takedowns, so in those cases there's not much they can do. It's up to the person who had their content taken down to file a lawsuit if they want the person filing the takedown notice to face punishment (which is one of the broken aspects of the DMCA law).

YouTube does punishes false claims through their Content ID system, though, as that's a system they control. From their website, "Content owners who repeatedly make erroneous claims can have their Content ID access disabled and their partnership with YouTube terminated."

YouTube says that, I've seen no evidence that they've ever actually punished a false claim, or even prevented that false claim from happening again.

For example, a video of mine was ContentID claimed for a public domain piece of classical music. I successfully contested the claim (the scammers give up quickly because their bread-and-butter is the 95% of victims who YouTube scared away from the "contest claim" button, or who never revisit the video page after posting). About a month later, I re-edited the same video and re-uploaded it, and I got the same fraudulent strike from the same scammer that I'd already successfully contested.

Wouldn't this also be really easy to game? Create a new account solely to make the copyright complaints?

Yes, it's one of the major issues with Youtube right now, even with then putting funds into escrow. It's also an opportunity to have fun, such as people uploading videos to deliberately trigger DMCA claims from multiple parties so that they can fight over it.

Not if there were simple measures put in place to stop new or otherwise unused accounts from making copyright complaints. Just to be thorough there could be an outlet for unregistered users that had a higher threshold of evidence required before taking the alleged infringing video down.

Kind of funny how it takes more effort to earn the privilege of downvoting on hn than it takes to make a legal statement (perjury yada yada) but I imagine adding these constraints will lead to a lawsuit before you can spell class action. Even if the lawsuit ultimately fails, it costs a bunch to defend it. In the face of effective zero competition, how can they justify the expense/risk to their corporate owners?

this comment isn't meant to be snarky, but as someone who deals with google as a vendor, it sounds like pretty typical google across the board, including the poor customer service.

> I lost about $1500 in revenues which was never returned.

I've always wondered how much people make broadcasting on Youtube, could you possibly provide any insight into this (# videos you've posted, views stats, revenues, etc), or point me to anywhere one could read up on this?

https://socialblade.com/youtube/ Is a pretty good tool for this.

I have some friends who are "professional YouTubers" (big enough to quit their day-jobs, not big enough to buy a Ferrari), who have told me they use that site for refernce. The estimate it gives has a pretty wide range, but it's typically in the middle of the two extremes. Just searched for one of my friends, and averaging the estimate gives just slightly more than what he's making in a month from YT.

Of course, it's all really variable and depends on the size of your channel. In January he had a video go viral and made as much as he did in all of 2015, but has since gone back to his more regular numbers (growing a little every month).

Wow, I've always wondered what someone like markiplier makes. Even at the absolute low end, that's a crazy amount of money.

DCTC toy channel, taking your middle of the road estimate = $6 million / yr.....unbelievable.

It varies, heavily. There are many calculators out there that try to answer this question, just drop "youtube revenue calculator" into your favorite search engine and a bunch will come up.

Take the estimates with a grain of salt, but they'll give you an idea of what's involved. I've seen some content creators laugh at the numbers that are predicted for them, and others have shown surprise at their accuracy. So again, it varies.

One little fact to shed some light on the scale of money flowing. Microsoft was caught paying under the table for shilling Xbox one exclusives, FTC released documents mentioning $15-30K _per one short video_ from Youtubers in 50-100K subs range.

YT ad revenue is nothing compared from what you can milk while astroturfing.

> I lost about $1500 in revenues which was never returned.

apparently (according to a podcast I listen to) they are actually dealing with this. I guess before if you filed a copyright claim you could just monetize and make off with the money on a video?

AFAICT, previously YouTube would turn off advertisements on any video in conflict, so nobody (including YouTube) made any money on a copyright claim.

Yup. I really don't get it. YouTube has so much potential, they have so much value and potential value in their content creators yet they continue to treat them generally very poorly. More proof that google is just bad at customer relationships. There are about a zillion very straightforward to implement things that google could be doing to significantly further YouTube and provide better service to their creators as well as build their revenue, but they haven't done any of them. It's maddening.

If YouTube is such a crap fest, why not use an alternative like Vimeo?

Vimeo has a reverse business model from YouTube, creators must pay Vimeo to host their videos. They also do not have an ad-revenue sharing program for creators to make money back from.

Brady Haran and CGP Grey discuss their YouTube business and their gripes with the platform on Hello Internet. http://www.hellointernet.fm/podcast/58

Not the original commenter, but:

1) Discovery's huge. People discover your video if it's on YouTube through YouTube similarity display, search, and similar. 2) Vimeo's still plagued with incompatibility issues. Every time I've done a major launch of a video on Vimeo I've had complaints. 3) People are just more comfortable with YouTube.

Overall, as a rule of thumb as an indie filmmaker, I'd expect to get 4x the views from a YouTube release that I would from a Vimeo release.

Vimeo doesn't have the audience, and it's not looking for the type of content most youtube channels create.

YouTube is a lot more than just a place to upload a video. It has discoverability, an ad platform, social...

It is prime time for competitors of YouTube to come out of the woodwork. Everyone is incredibly tired of YouTube's bonkers copyright complaints system which has already resulted in many people moving to Twitch.

To beat YouTube you essentially need to reproduce YouTube then create a more balanced playing field between content creators and copyright owners. At the moment the content creators exist in a "guilty until proven innocent world" where the copyright owner are the judge and jury too! It is bonkers, fair usage is dead on YouTube.

The real question is how would a competitor deal with the immense pressure from the music and film industry bodies? I mean, YouTube has nothing to gain from making life difficult for content creators - they are acting in this way because they have essentially been compelled to. If a competitor became popular enough, the same thing would happen.

For one thing they could require people to submit real DMCA notices. YouTube's system isn't DMCA-based, and as much as I dislike the DMCA, it still provides greater protections than YouTube's system does.

That's how bad YouTube's draconian copyright system is, the DMCA is an "upgrade."

Note that if 'real' DMCA notices were to be the norm, then YouTube, by law, would be unable to give back access to materials before 10 business days expired, and only after receiving a valid DMCA counter-notice[0].

Compare this to the current system where they actually have the ability to evaluate the content ID notice independently and then make adjustments. They may not always use that ability, but at least they have it. With DMCA, their hands are tied.

Specifically, 17 US code 512 (g)(2)(C) (emphasis mine):

"(C) replaces the removed material and ceases disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice, unless its designated agent first receives notice from the person who submitted the notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) that such person has filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on the service provider’s system or network."

That's two full weeks (not including weekends and holidays), where even if the DMCA is clearly bogus, they have no choice but to keep the content offline if they want to keep their safe harbour status.

So it may not be the best system, but the DMCA isn't either.

[0] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 section (g)

That's not quite true. YouTube does have to follow the DMCA as required by law, and so they do so accordingly.

They also have a separate automated system ("Content ID"), which can automatically block videos or put ads on them and pay the content owner (the latter being a unique feature not possible with just the DMCA), and because it's controlled by YouTube and is more flexible than the law, it provides a generally better experience to the uploader compared to getting a DMCA takedown notice.

If an uploader gets a Content ID claim, then they can dispute it, and if the person making that claim is forced to file a regular DMCA takedown if they want the video to be taken down. Content ID is just the initial step in some cases, but at any point in the process, the DMCA takedown process can be invoked.

> If an uploader gets a Content ID claim, then they can dispute it, and if the person making that claim is forced to file a regular DMCA takedown if they want the video to be taken down.

I don't believe that's true. The claimant can merely tell YouTube, "no, my claim is legit" and YouTube trusts them implicitly without requiring a DMCA notice. While the claimant could produce a DMCA notice at any point, ContentID doesn't require them to to knock the video offline.

After the uploader disputes an automated claim, the claimant can uphold it as you described, but the user then has the option to appeal that claim. The only way to settle that appeal is for the claimant to either drop the claim or at that point file a DMCA takedown. That's the process I was describing. YouTube has information on the process here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797454?hl=en (look under "What happens after I appeal?")

Agreed, not to mention that to fight any notice in YouTube, you have limited options - as in, you are presented with a form that has radio buttons, of which none of the responses are 'this claim is without merit'.

I've had to battle YT multiple times over music or content which I owned the rights to. In many cases, I was the creator of the content in question.

I just looked on some of the claims I've gotten on my own videos, an one of the options for a dispute is "The video is my original content and I own all of the rights to it.", which I think sums up the problem you were facing.

It's not to do with what the other options are though, the issue is that they have been forced to operate in the way they currently are. Commercially speaking the benefits to making the system fairer to creators are clear for YouTube - I am sure they are aware of just how unpopular their current systems are.

No, they are not. In fact they are aggressively defending themselves against the music industry (big-time manager Irving Azoff wrote and open letter yesterday) and claiming everything they do is awesome. Azoff points out their approach is actually more of a strong-arm tactic and, in some respects, an abuse of the DMCA, which YouTube chooses to simply shrug off. It's a contentious issue but making it sound like "poor little ol' YouTube is getting bullied!" is simply wrong, as they have serious profit motive to keep their questionable approach going as long as possible.

how does something like that scale to the size of youtube?

It doesn't, not without lots of labor, and that's sort of the crux of the issue...

A YouTube replacement will be better in this respect only as long as they remain small and under the radar of the movie/record industry. :/

At some point, Google might have to hire (gasp!) actual human beings to provide customer support, instead of just relying on their crappy unfriendly automated systems.

> I mean, YouTube has nothing to gain from making life difficult for content creators - they are acting in this way because they have essentially been compelled to.

To be fair to YouTube, their ContentID system is better now than when it was launched. (Now it'll actually tell you where in the video the infringing content supposedly is, and allow you to do automatic audio-replacement in some cases.) And to be fair, they've finally implemented an escrow system that can help for some false ContentID strikes.

But they've still taken no action I can see to reduce the number of fraudulent ContentID strikes. Creators have a "three strikes, you're out" system; ContentID claimants seem to be able to push out millions of false claims with absolutely no response from Google.

If I'm liable to lose access to my account for using someone else copyright without permission, than I see no reason a ContentID claimant should get off scot-free for claiming someone else's copyright (or a public domain work) without permission.

If there was some enforcement of that in place, I'd call the system "fair". As-is, it's grossly unfair.

But even if you kicked them out of ContentID, they'd still be able to send regular DMCA takedown requests, and as far as I know there's no provision that allows Google to ignore those from "problematic claimants".

At least forcing DMCA requests would make it a crime of perjury. Right now, a false ContentID claim is no crime and carries no penalty.

Yes, but nobody ever was convicted of perjury for sending fake DMCA takedown requests, despite evidence of companies using dumb scrapers that auto-send takedowns for anything with the same name as their work, so does it really count as a deterrent?

I don't know. I'd like to see them try it, because screw ContentID scammers.

I'm sure it would scare at least some percentage of them away.

How about by operating in a "fuck you" jurisdiction like Russia (they have really fast internet, rutracker.org users all know this), or Belize (where Redfox is HQ'd, because a WTO dispute settlement over the US blocking online gambling allowed Belize to violate US copyrights without consequence).

If YT was still an independent company, that might work (though they'd probably get blocked along with other "pirate" sites), but as a part of Google, that's simply infeasible.

It seems like the fair way to handle it is to have (small) monetary repercussions on false accusations, and on violations. If you post copyrighted material, you pay the cost of a (human) identification. If you accuse someone of copyright which is legitimate, you pay for the accusation. Algorithms should be targeting scanners, not judge & executioner.

Don't worry, once those other services become popular enough they'll also be subject to a "bonkers copyright complaints system".

What if they're in another part of the world? This sort of copyright abuse makes me think that a video hosting system based in China or Russia could do pretty well here. Kind of like how the Pirate Bay keeps coming back, or how the likes of SciHub seem prepared for any of their domains being lost/hosting wrecked by journal publishers.

The MPAA and RIAA observe no borders. The Pirate Bay may keep popping up, but the founders have all paid a big price courtesy of these 2 organizations.

What about with people from those regions? Most problems with the Pirate Bay involved the founders being in countries friendly to the US, and a lot of problems with other shut down sites like Silk Road had the founders in the US itself.

Imagine if something from the government regime in those countries sponsored such a site. Would the US be willing to get in a massive geopolitical argument with Russia or China over some copyright disputes?

A video service hosted in Russia or China would have it's own problems. No freedom of the press in either country, and lots of issues with free speech. Any video critical of Putin or Xi Jinping would likely be taken down. Hard to operate a service with that kind of restriction.

Serious question: Why? Google might be subject to pressure since they also sell licensed media on the side, but what's to stop an independent from saying something along the lines of

"We're the host here, we're subject to DMCA safe harbor, either file a proper claim (to be evaluated by our counsel to avoid bogus complaints from a Mr. Russel, first name Jimmy) or get lost."

Even with the 10 days wait and counter-notice, this is strictly better than the nonsense system Youtube uses where people can have their content pulled down by trolls with no consequences.

Why couldn't a troll issue a "proper" (if fraudulent) DMCA request claiming to represent the copyright holder? It's just copying a template, filling in the blanks and sending the email.

Google, on the other hand, can't deny the takedown as long as all the requirements are met (AFAIK, IANAL), and besides, good luck paying for enough lawyer time when you're getting hundreds or thousands of requests per day.

Not sure but DMCA seems to affect many obscure download websites that have no part in licensed media sales.

Amazon has a very bad track record of integrating with other services: do you think you'll be able to watch this on a normal Android phones? or an Apple TV? or a Chromecast? will they let other places on the internet embed videos easily? how will they be substantially better on copyright/DMCA complaints?

On top of all that, I think this needs a nice clean discoverable UI for this type of thing to be successful and they've really struggled with that in the past.

I'm also sad about what keeps happening to Prime. This has a benefit that I wouldn't consider strong enough to sign up for while the rest of the business continues to sneakily weaken the shipping benefit I did sign up for.

This. I still can't take advantage of Amazon prime video streaming on my Android phone without 1) allowing app installs from third parties and making my device insecure 2) installing the Amazon app store 3) THEN installing the Prime video app.

Proof: http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/splash/sd/t/appstore

Everything they do is to drive traffic traffic to their properties first, and serve paying customers second.

Back when Kindle launched, it was very common to see the story of Kodak being floated around (film vs digital) to claim how Amazon is flexible. Fast forward a few years, Amazon video and music services are the worst in terms of cross platform support. The primary reason I don't buy/rent anything from Amazon Digital is because I can't stream it to my Chromecast. Considering the adoption for Chromecast I would have expected Amazon to support. Instead they ban it from Amazon.com.

I initially thought the problem was with my network and device setup at home. So I upgraded my router to the best I could afford, got the latest Chromecast incarnation and thought I was ready to go.

I can cast any tab from Chrome to my TV without any issues with the sole exception of Amazon Video. It's the only site that stutters like mad when casting.

Well I think Amazon just played the tit for tat card here. Historically, Google took the first slab by banning Amazon from it's app store: http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/11/google-removes-amazons-app-...

No wonder Amazon is now reciprocating by explicitly disallowing chromecast devices on its own site.

tl;dr; Google ain't a saint/good citizen either. No one is.

Google removed Amazon's app for violating the ToS, which clearly states that you may not sell your own app store through Google's.

This is still entirely on Amazon's bad behavior.

Also, your theory sort of excuses Amazon but does not explain why they also banned Apple TV.

Surprisingly their Fire TV devices can act as a Chromecast receiver, so you can cast from an Android phone to the Amazon set top box.

Good question. But when I think about that.... No I do t think so.

I love Amazon, but I wish they would integrate more with other companies. Did they really need to make their own app store?

I own several kindles, and I was hoping to play a few learning videos for my child on the kindle fire. Well, the Youtube support is quite lacking.

I am not sure if this new video venture will work out. Youtube has quite a bit of momentum, and it has far more support across the mainstream devices than anyone else.

Vimeo is second place in my mind, but I have not watched a video on there in ages.

"Did they really need to make their own app store?"

Yes, they did. Not for your benefit, but for theirs. They're a retailer, and they want to control their own ecosystem. Does Walmart let Target have a corner of their stores to sell stuff in? No,they don't.

There are few real-world analogies for the vertical that is Amazon. We don't have brick and mortar construction companies that also are a retailer (as far as I know). Amazon is like a company that builds houses, and will only allow Amazon appliances inside the house, even though other appliances generally work fine. Your buddy across the street has a house made by Google, and their house can have any appliance, which kinda irks you.

Well, not quite. The point is that you can't get anything for your Amazon "house" that Amazon isn't taking a cut from the sale.

(And in ye olde days, there was a time when you could open the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and order, literally, a whole house and everything that needed to go inside it, and have it delivered to you.)

> Vimeo is second place in my mind, but I have not watched a video on there in ages.

I see quite a few Vimeo videos, but never on their page, all as embeds on other sites.

the short answer to your first question is yes. You can't get Google Play services (the store) without being Android, and there are some differences between FireOS and Android that support features of Kindle Fire but preclude the Kindle Fire from running straight CAF[0] Android.

[0] https://www.codeaurora.org/

It's fairly trivial to install Google Play and associated apps on the Fire and it can be done without rooting - just by sideloading an APK.

you are correct, but Amazon cannot do that. The changes to Android are small but large enough that Amazon can't call Fire OS Android.

You must not browse popular subreddits on reddit often. Vimeo is used there a lot for more professional kinds of videos from filmmakers and I see them a lot. There also has been A LOT of hate recently toward YouTube due to their pretty awful content id system.

However even with the alternative I doubt people will switch. Too much work to switch to another platform and get the audience to move elsewhere. YouTube is working to fix the content id problem so likely people will go back to loving it and all will be the same.

I doubt amazon will have much success, nor do I think they would do it any better than Google.

Same. I was reading on a kindle yesterday and wanted to internet search a highlighted phrase.

The kindle let me look it up in a dictionary, even search wikipedia, but no internet search.

Yes, yes they did need to create their own Appstore.

I am reminded of an old Hypercritical podcast: "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/74). Everyone wants their own stack to have full control over. So now we've got multiple gardens (of differing openness) tended by cathedrals.

This is HUGE for the independent film world.

It's currently incredibly hard to sell an independent film online via a well-known and trusted channel that people are used to buying through. The nearest equivalent before this was getting onto iTunes through an aggregator, which costs $1500 or so per film.

I'm tremendously happy Amazon have taken this step: it'll be a huge benefit for indie filmmakers.

Interesting. Isn't vimeo an avenue? https://vimeo.com/ondemand/startselling

Last time I checked they required you to create an account before buying a film. That's an absolute conversion-killer.

Also, there's a huge difference between most people's comfort level in buying from Amazon and buying from Some Random Site - and Vimeo still counts as Some Random Site for most people. (As does Gumroad and similar.)

Finally, the discovery aspect is significant. People are searching Amazon for films to buy and watch. They, by and large, aren't searching Vimeo for that.

YouTube also allows users to sell or rent their videos directly through the website [0], so this doesn't seem very different to me.

[0]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3249127?hl=en

Not exactly sure why but I personally feel more comfortable buying media from Amazon than from YouTube. I feel like I should be getting everything for free from YouTube.

I agree. Contrariwise, even though I'm an Amazon Prime member, it very rarely occurs to me that there are videos on Amazon that might be "free" for me to watch. I just can't help thinking of it as a place to BUY things.

Presumably I won't be able to watch the videos using my Chromecast.

While Amazon Prime does not currently support the Chromecast, you should be able to at least cast the browser tab.

That is not an acceptable alternative, sadly. :(

You would unfortunately have to take that up with Amazon

Yep, this is totally on them. It's led me to stop using their video products, and we're not renewing Prime after this period expires.

I agree it sucks, but you could have bought a Roku or something you knew already supported Amazon Prime in the first place instead of a Chromecast. It's not like there's never been competition in that space; Chromecast is a super-late-comer.

I could have, although I've owned a few Roku boxes and they've all been slow, unresponsive and crash-prone. We actually upgraded from Roku to Chromecast.

Amazon would prefer I buy their Fire TV stick thing, which they would then use as a hook to sell me more Amazon stuff. Given Amazon's attitude towards Apple and Google's streaming devices, chances seem decent to me that if Roku ever increased its market share then Amazon might cut them off.

I'd rather just use another streaming video store.

Aside from Youtube's copyright system, I also hope something like this works out because of their UI. I mean, let's face it. Youtube just seems to change their layout and features every few months or so, regardless of whether they make the site easier to use or not and regardless of what anyone actually wants said changes.

If Amazon can come up with a good, user friendly UI and then not screw it up by making constant changes, they could do quite well here.

As a light user it's relatively the same for me..

Upvote on purpose :D

Sorry, accidental downvote

Something like two months later, I still have not managed to get my custom YouTube URL. Everything to do with YouTube (which is completely filtered into G+) is a miserable experience, and I can't wait for more competition.

Implying you've met standard requirements, correct? Did you try "advanced" method of claiming ownership of URL to use name?

I've tried just about anything, including contacting support who never got back.

They've got this dumb system where you can claim a custom link, but it's

   youtube.com/c/TaylorGood[]

where you have to fill in [] with something. It makes no goddamn sense, and if I do it, that's going to be the new permanent url, which I clearly don't want.

Google are so clueless sometimes.

This is huge. Amazon has the firepower to take on youtube. Hopefully Amazon can come up with a clean UI that makes people WANT to use their service unlike amazons current video streaming service.

Funny, I was thinking the opposite... I was wondering if people would actually use this system, and how Amazon would distinguish the naming... part of why "YouTube" is successful, is it stayed "YouTube" instead of "Google Video".

A separate brand for a separate product is important, as anything else dilutes the brand, which is already doing that to itself pretty well. Google has been better than many companies with this imo. Apple, better still.

It will be interesting in how this works out and ties into Twitch, as I think that will be the more natural conduit for integration. As it stands, it's just another place for clickbait sites to embed video from.

Is this going to be tied to Amazon's crappy app store as well so regular Android users won't use it?

maybe they'll make it available via sideloading from the web directly.

In the article they mention 15cents/6cents per hour. Is it considered a lot compared to ad revenue ?

I have a video that got 17600 views and 25000 minutes watched according to youtube analytics. It made $22.50 from ads. So that comes out to 5.4 cents/hour.

What happens if you make a super long video full of nothingness, does that scam the system? YouTube has tons of videos that are 10 hours long of silliness on repeat, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZ7oFKsKzY

Total aside, but now that they are encroaching on Google's territory in video, I would hope they move to create a free mapping service for AWS users. Startups that try to generate revenue are so hamstrung by the baseline $10,000 maps for work license.

The Amazon service requires close-captioning. Is that hard for video producers to set up?

There's free software that allows you to create subtitles/captions. For your average consumer who just wants to shoot a family video and upload it, that is a very large barrier to entry compared to youtube. For a high quality video creator who puts a lot of effort into editing videos, it's not much extra effort. This would be one way to ensure most videos are high quality.

> This would be one way to ensure most videos are high quality.

I'm not so sure of that - Amazon can't possibly police every single video to ensure correct closed-captioning. There are likely tools that can take a video, rip the audio stream and machine generate a subtitle file for you. If you have a person uploading a family video this will pass the "good enough" bar for you. You'd get something close to Youtube's automatic closed-captions.

This service doesn't seem to be intended for family videos at all. AFAICT it's not even possible to upload a video without monetizing it.

If I'm a big video content producer what incentive do I have to remove myself from the user base of youtube?

I have pocket recorded (imagine the quality) a Les Miserables show in 2011 and uploaded to YouTube at the end of 2012 when it became clear a legal CD won't happen (it should've!). It was taken offline and a copyright strike lodged against me last week. Do they own the copyright? Sure! But there are no legal recordings of that particular cast. So tell me how was their business affected by my upload? Mind boggling.

A free version online would inhibit sales of any future releases if they choose to do so. Just because you can't legally purchase it today doesn't allow you to harm the future sales of tomorrow.

People miss completely miss my point. There is a demand for this, there are forums, there are forum trackers where people trade bootlegs, illegal recordings from shows. Why are these not released? Just put it out as MP3, it doesn't need to be anything spectacular, if you do not want do not even spend money on editing just put the soundboard recording out. There will be people who would die to pay for these, I know. There is nothing to lose -- wait until the cast changes (perhaps even just the lead) and then upload the previous cast recording. Done! Why, why, why this is not done? I need to hunt down musical shows from 16 years ago, why I can't just buy them? Who loses a single cent from me copying a 16 year old show which was not released legally? Piracy is a service problem doubly, triply so in the musical world because there is no legal supply and there is demand.

dura lex, sed lex.

"The law is harsh but it is the law."

Ha! I presume I deserve that. But what I am asking is -- why is the law this way? And, of course, the next step is, how do I change it? Or much rather: how could I convince the rightsholders to serve us better? For many years I have been yearning to be able to speak up and be heard in copyright-related matters but I can't for my life figure out how.

Such things have been done. It's a matter of researching the people responsible and trying to figure out what they would respond to. Bring enough folks to the public outcry and maybe they will see your point. There are several movies that exist almost solely because of public outcry, so I would think it might be possible to get an official recording done.

Or run for office and work on legislation to change the law. But I seriously doubt you would make many friends in the entertainment industry if you try to change copyright law too much.

Can you name any musical releases five years after the show? That cast lasted only a year.

That's really not the point.

> Just because you can't legally purchase it today doesn't allow you to harm the future sales of tomorrow.

There are no current or future sales. That's my point: if you are not releasing a specific recording then why do you have copyright over it?

There may be no current sales but I don't see how you can claim there will be no sales in the future.

A retail release has nothing to do with copyright. I can have copyright over something I've created, never offer it for sale to anyone, and still keep my copyright.

One specific video doesn't affect the business much. But when a lot copyrighted stuff is uploaded unchecked, it does. They were sued for $1 billion by Viacom for copyright violation.

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