Revver is down...forever?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by SammyK on January 31, 2009 at 7:12pm

I'm a huge fan of Vimeo. But that's just because of their believably crisp encoding. I'm going to be getting a pro account soon.

Permalink Reply by Craig Martin on February 1, 2009 at 2:25am

That's the reason I'm drifting towards Vimeo. Blip seems to have more flexible distribution arrangements though...Dilemma!

Permalink Reply by Nathan Shipley on February 4, 2009 at 4:50am

Throw in a second vote for Vimeo. Quality is great, interface is great and easy to use, and the options are great. Don't see this one going away...

Permalink Reply by Kim Mance, Founder of TBEX on February 1, 2009 at 8:58am

Wow, that's really upsetting that Revver would just go down like that! Can you switch your feeds, were they connected through feedburner? That really sucks!

We've been using blip and had fairly decent ad sharing, and I like that the player is self-branded. That said, it seems like a lot of the big shows are using Vimeo, but I can't say I know much about it. I'm not sure you could go wrong with either of the players though.

Not sure that helped...

Permalink Reply by Craig Martin on February 1, 2009 at 5:53pm

Blip.tv support has been in touch already (Monday morning Aussie time, probably Sunday night in the US). They've suggested a simple solution which looks like it will work.

My video feed came directly from Revver to Yahoo pipes to feedburner. I didn't realise Revver was down because google screwed up the migration of the feeds to the servers. What a pain!

Here's an example of video quality between the two:
Vimeo:

Bunbury Australia road trip (ITPv20) from Craig Martin on Vimeo. Blip:

What do you think?

Permalink Reply by Craig Martin on February 1, 2009 at 5:56pm

And youtube for good measure. Since they're the biggest audience, I'm thinking about them too.

Permalink Reply by Kim Mance, Founder of TBEX on February 2, 2009 at 8:18am

Wow, I'm surprised at how good the YouTube version looks, did you embed in high-quality mode?

Vimeo was definitely best, but then I think YouTube next. Blip was third! I've never seen a side-by-side comparison before.

Hmmm.....so I'm humbly voting either YouTube or Vimeo. Question though, does Vimeo help cross-post to other places like Blip (and Blip can auto-convert your stuff to make it ready for iTunes too)?

Permalink Reply by Gary Arndt on February 2, 2009 at 12:26am

You can post video on every hosting service. The question is which are you going to promote.

The problem with Revver is the problem you face with every hosting service other than YouTube: they might go out of business. I don't think Google is going anywhere.

YouTube has vastly improved the quality of their video in the last few weeks. The potential reach via YouTube is a few orders of magnitude greater than any other service. Whatever quality you may sacrifice using YouTube at this point is I think outweighed by the stability and audience size.

I did use Vimeo and I may still post videos there, but I'm going to promote and embed YouTube as my primary host from now on.

I see no point to travel specific video sites. They only thing they offer is a smaller audience. It makes as much sense as a travel specific email or photo site. The subject nature of the video is irrelevant to the technical and business concerns behind hosting it.

Permalink Reply by Kim Mance, Founder of TBEX on February 2, 2009 at 8:20am

We cross-post to travel-specific sites simply because it's a targeted audience. Yes, the YouTubes, etc, are going to get more views, but we're also into having engaged viewers, which is more likely in niche spaces.

That said, we of course post to as many places as possible to raise visibility, including YouTube. I have a love/hate relationship with the fact that YouTube displays the number of views, since it doesn't much benefit us cross-posters who get many views on other platforms too...So there is a definite benefit to using YouTube exclusively. Of course then you have to set up an iTunes feed and any others all separately...ah, the conundrum :)

Permalink Reply by Craig Martin on February 3, 2009 at 6:45am

YouTube is looking really good, actually. I didn't do any magic; just used tubemogul to post there.

We'll continue to post everywhere. Now, I'm thinking the question is who has the best integration with iTunes and can help us to get our back catalogue back up easily.

Permalink Reply by Gary Arndt on February 6, 2009 at 6:01am

The fact that everyone can post everywhere will spell the doom for most of these companies. They will offer no unique content because anything which can be found on their network can be found on YouTube.

The only advantage they had was the fact that YouTube had been slow to implement new features after they were purchased by Google. That seems to be a thing of the past as they have been adding several new features in the last month.

The only real unique thing I can see at this point are in video comments which you can see on Viddler, live streaming, or some community features. YouTube gets much higher priority on Google searches.

YouTube doesn't have to innovate at this point, they just have to keep pace and they will be unbeatable. Since you saw a wave of companies do flash based HD video, there hasn't been much innovation in the video front.

For advertising, I think your best bet is to do private ad deals and not to rely on networking advertising like you have with Adsense.

Permalink Reply by Craig Martin on February 6, 2009 at 6:50am

Very good points. I just hate using cluttered sites. And youtube is certainly cluttered.

I agree with you on the $ front -- both for companies and what's best for vloggers.

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