Video is Coming to Reddit
redditblog.com
redditblog.com
I've never heard anyone complain that copying a URL is too onerous.
I don't get what they're plan is. How does a company that is currently losing money plan to make more and be a sustainable enterprise by adding features that only increase their costs? Video uses a lot of bandwidth. Especially compared everything they've done so far (i.e. all text).
They had a good thing going with the mooching off free hosting on YouTube and Imgur. Why kill that? All I see them gaining are a bit more details on how many times someone played a video. And you could probably do that with some custom JS wrapping the YouTube player (guessing here ... not sure how that works in practice).
"This launch is a giant step forward in our efforts to bring rich content to Reddit, following last year’s release of native image hosting and our introduction of native video ads earlier this year."
Which means having to watch a 30 second ad before a 15second video clip.
Hopefully you'll be able to just use youtube-dl or a similar app to download the video and skip the ads, just as you can for videos that are on youtube.
If Youtube and especially small company Imgur can profit this way, so can reddit.
And seeing as reddit has so few avenues to monetize users, letting Google and Imgur mop up the vast majority of link ad revenue seems very silly.
I totally see your point but shouldn't they monetize what they have now before go on to tackle other revenue venture?
Or is it better to tackle all possible revenue venture at the same time?
I feel like it's stretches them thin no?
Especially in startup, it seems like they're always looking for way to get their investor to invest more. There are many cases where I thought it being so shady.
I acknowledge business people and what they do but there are things in the this industry where it's just not for me.
I thought that their own image service would bring back missed revenue from imgur (which it has appeared to do since it has caught on). Unfortunately to do this they designed it to disallow direct image links (and the reason that it is banned).
Not to mention it's just downright slower than imgur.
Although, it's not like imgur is without fault nowadays, in their continued efforts to foster their own (IMO, awful) community off of the back of another (Reddit), it is nigh-on impossible to go directly to an image on the mobile site now - instead you get forced back to their gallery-style page full of 'related content', which only serves to slow the loading of the shit I actually want to see.
They are going to start getting hit with more and more DMCAs, etc. The compliance cost for video and/or audio goes up alot in my experience. Also more likely to be sued (a la Youtube).
For the most part, still pictures, its rare to get any kind of DMCA notice and you basically never get sued.
Relatively. CDN costs have plummeted over the years. It now costs $5/TB to serve videos, and under $3/TB if you're in petabyte ranges (BunnyCDN, BelugaCDN).
I guess this is a problem with the in-house Reddit app. There are many problems which can, and should be, solved on the frontend. This is one of them.
> I don't get what they're plan is.
Exactly, they could just add gfycat/imgur support to the app (which is what Sync already does).
> losing money
They will also have to deal with DCMA (historically, the content hosts have), which means hiring people to vet false claims. Not to mention that redditors are ferocious when it comes to false claims and 'censorship.' This is a PR nightmare waiting to happen.
No, it doesn't. You can just honor any facially-valid notice and give the user the opportunity for counter-notice, and (if you care about liability to users, which you probably don't need to) then also honor any facially-valid counter-notice.
The DMCA safe harbor process is designed specifically so that content hosts have no need to care about whether a claim is true or false if they follow it.
It built it to settle a lawsuit that was on appeal that it kept winning (at summary judgement, twice) against Viacom, largely because YouTube’s long term goals were better served by friendly relations with big copyright holders.
By charging a fifteen dollar CPM for ads shown on their videos.
I'm not entirely sure the same will happen with video. Not only are the videos typically posted on Reddit's largest video subreddits are from the YouTube community (and intended for the YouTube community), the video player beta is apparently a worse user experience than YouTube. (in contrast with images, where the competitor was the one with the worse user experience)
And that's not even getting into the logistical concerns. Hosting images is much, much easier than video, as video has much higher bandwidth/storage requirements AND Reddit will have to frequently remove pirated/NSFW videos for Safe Harbor protection/advertiser friendliness, which is a challenge even Google has not been able to solve at scale.
Video hosting? You need a good player (nothing will ever top YouTube's) and a good CDN. That's a tough nut to crack. Especially for a company with no money.
Video is super expensive in terms of bandwidth, but the technical pipeline for ingesting, transcoding, delivering, and presenting it is extremely simple now.
Yet nearly every time I use a player that isn't YouTube's it stinks. Cursor doesn't disappear. Inconsistent interaction model (does double click move in/out of full screen? Do the arrow keys work? Does 'm' mute? Etc.)
It's not just about the ability to play a video, you have to get the UX right as well, and most don't.
A video player that doesn't make me wait a long time before going to full resolution,or that lets me select full resolution when I'll not on desktop, would be a huge plus for me.
In the last week goon to YouTube's site on mobile to watch videos has often been broken. Turning off my adblocker doesn't fix it. Going to the desktop site sometimes fixes it. Very off-putting.
And you know what I would kill for? A display of how long a video is before I play it. And maybe an indication of if it has sound.
I'll point out I don't use any apps and even on mobile I use the desktop site.
But YouTube seems to be getting slowly worse, which doesn't really surprise me. Imgur had DEFINITELY gotten WAY worse than even a year or so ago.
Good luck to Reddit. This may be a serious improvement.
Every youtube video thumbnail has that in the lower right corner.
When I click a link that takes me to YouTube I can't see it until I start playing.
There is vicious cycle with all image hosting services and Imgur(and Photobucket) has reached the last step:
1. Notice all other services are filled with ads and full of bloat
2. Create new, free and very simple image uploading site
3. Site gains popularity
4. Operating costs go through the roof
5. Try to monetize by adding ads or move to paid accounts
6. goto 1
Reddit doesn't exactly have "no money": https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/reddit-just-raised-a-new-r...
In the copyright side, hosting vs. linking has both similar risks and similar DMCA protections around user generated content, so while they'll probably have a higher volume of complaints when they are both the link venue and the source host, I don't think that fundamentally changes anything, either.
Does the benefit redditors? No.
Based on the testing so far the mobile player is not ready for prime time nor is the backend video infrastructure. Videos lag horribly and spin sometimes forever .. as if the connection was broken.
Captive content ecosystems, despite their widely-recognized drawbacks, aren't devoid of engagement. Vine was a captive content ecosystem whose attributes resulted in many creative works; Snapchat and its Facebook-run clones -- most notably the Stories inside Instagram -- are another, where the content is made and consumed by the official app and never escapes out onto the public web. As an extreme example, Hulu is a captive content ecosystem where all the content happens to be professionally produced.
Captive content ecosystems are excellent places to sell ads, because you track the user's content consumption habits, and control the client such that they can't easily avoid the ads using technical means.
Other than YouTube are there any web video players that are ready for prime time? Facebook's player is as much of a nightmare of usability as would be expected from the rest of their site, it's unusable for me on both an iPhone 6s in their native app and on the web. Netflix does a good job in their apps but I haven't used their web player in years, is it any good?
News sites seem to love auto-playing videos that don't actually play but still follow the visitor through the page. If the videos do play I can look forward to my laptop fans ('14 RMBP) immediately kicking into high gear. Is this the experience I can look forward to on Reddit?
Outside Youtube I can't think of a single video player I would even call usable, forget polished.
Some other good web video players:
- Vimeo - Hulu
HBO Now's web player is pretty good, tho not great. They definitely seem to have a hard time with their backend some times (e.g. around season premieres of Game of Thrones).
In general tho, video playback is just the latest spiritual incarnation of popup ads.
No. It is not.
In my experience, video stutters and splits even in Windows with 2 rx480s, and refuses to work in GNU/Linux.
Netflix's web player is great, except that it limits you to 720p.
DRM is hard (it's really an impossible pipe dream, but that's another conversation). Getting any sort of "DRM" to work in a browser with a good UI/UX is difficult, and most of the huge media providers (HBO, Vudu, etc.) are still using outdated, buggy, sluggish flash-based methods. The only decent video player using "DRM" that I know of is Netflix, which still has arbitrary limitations, like 720p video.
I can't speak to what they would use for a CDN.
Decoding support in HTML5 is pretty good (except for HEVC). The only things that Reddit would need to care about are file size and audio. It seems likely that Reddit would reject audio, or categorize videos that have it, so it could give fair warning.
They should only give the option to people who wish to host sporadic content in a simpler way, especially using smatphone. But without focusing on being the first choice for content creators until they have a great strategy to help them make money.
With images, it made sense -- Imgur was trying to become Reddit and hosting was a means of shoring up defense against that.
No one wants reddit video. Reddit is an aggregator whose core strength is discovery; Youtube cannot so easily become Reddit like Imgur could.
Yeah, at some point they should reconsider their slogan "the front page of the internet" given their seeming desire to become an isolated walled garden.
Four years ago I joined reddit, tried it out for about 2 hours, and quit. I couldn't get past the (admittedly small) learning curve (especially acronyms: ITT, OP, TIL, etc). Two years ago I joined it for real after putting in an hour to learn what everything was.
Reddit is an amazing site, it's just kind of hard to get into it. By hosting their own video, they make it easier for new users.
EDIT: Point taken, I can see how this makes it easier for users to upload content to Reddit (especially original content, e.g. from a phone camera roll) without jumping through YouTube hoops.
If Reddit can make video uploading easier for people without a YouTube account or who forgot their password or don't want to visit 3 sites to get it done.
None of those originated or where even popularized by reddit AFAIK...
As an aside, I do believe the acronym ELI5 was coined and popularized on reddit (though the phrase itself did not originate there).
If your goal is to reach the largest audience it doesn't make sense to me to only hide it in reddit.
I've just stopped clicking on any image links from i.reddit.
also, reddit tracks every outbound click with a unique identifier -- be sure to block all reddit tracking
because what you really want is a 4k view of the dumpster fire rather than just reading about it.
- I visit Reddit more often (which is unblocked)
- Reddit is surprisngly not that addictive; you skim it for few minutes and leave again
- AND this is the most important thing: Reddit is sometimes so funny, the posts and especially the top voted comments that I am cracking up every time, almost at the point of crying. After Reddit I am always in a very good mood.