Why use Youtube since there are alternatives?

Hello!

I have a huge question about using Youtube as Tek Syndicate's primary and only video distribution system. I hear Logan constantly complaining about the copyright claims and the troubles.

Why don't Tek Syndicate switch to alternatives such as Vimeo and then create a simple video index on main web site so people wouldn't need to look through 100 of pages to find the video. It could be a simple index with everything on only one site (also picture would be nice, but not important as it should be a simple index):

The Tek

0156: Intel Finally Admits to Rigging Benchmark Results Magnet link

           One sentence for description or without.

0155: You Can't Stop Us, You Can Only Magnet link

...

The Specials

3D Printers and future Magnet link

CES Magnet link

...

The Hardware

Some hardware video Magnet link

...

The Cooking

Cooking video Magnet link

...

 

And in addition, Tek Syndicate could upload videos as torrents for a short period of time or longterm (depends on how much space and bandwidth has the server).

I think that this wouldn't be so hard to implement and it would save Tek Syndicate a lot of time dealing with Youtube copyright claims and stupid uploading system. The scripts could be written that would automaticaly create Torrents and then add them to Tek Syndicate's simple index site.

Just my opinion on how to ger rid of troubles and improve media distribution.

Have a nice day,

Žiga

eh. Rather type www.youtube.com than go download a torrent.

 

 

 

Despite Youtube's shortcomings, it offers a much greater coverage, and audience-reach compared to Vimeo, and other video platforms (Youtube has an approximate audience-reach of around 1-billion, and still counting)

 

Love or hate the Youtube vehicle, it's the 'mode-of-choice' for content creators (especially for the Tek Syndicate)

 

With the complexities of digital content-use, 'copyright claims' will always be an issue whatever broadcast video platform the content creator is utilizing.

 

There would be many in the Tek Syndicate audience that have an aversion to utilizing 'torrents' (and for valid reasons)

 

Youtube offers convenience for many full-time, and occasional users of this viewing medium (and that's the biggest advantage of all)

Downloading youtube videos isnt that difficult... and like wolf said, its where the main audience is although it may not be the best as we can clearly see in the comments, it would be a really bad move to change platforms. They have built up a great following, why would you want to start from scratch again?

We were going to move to blip.tv. They invited us to join... then we said "maybe."

Then we said, "OK, we will join." And they said, "no." It looks like they are Maker Studios now... so I'm not sure about them anymore. 

The best idea we have is self hosting.......

Self-hosting is probably not a bad option Logan, a least you're not under any constraints. No doubt, there would be added infrastructure costs in adding this feature (time, and effort)

You could (I am not saying this is the best option) use a Megaupload based distribution. Youtube is great for visibility and ads and stuff though. Hosting a streaming service yourself would be great, but it isn't the best idea (I have seen streaming done poorly so many times). A torrent or Mega based platform would still get the videos out there, and wouldn't rely on anything like youtube.

Apple iTunes has shows, right?

The big advantage of self-hosting is that you have free choice of legal forum. You can situate your host in a country that has no crappy censorship rules or DMCA terror regime.

I sometimes have difficulty playing videos from Youtube ( they'll randomly hiccup once every couple of videos or so... ). So what I end up doing instead to avoid the frustration is fire up JDownloader to basically copy the entire video stream and watch it after it's done downloading. It would be interesting to see torrent support for each of your videos; I don't see why other people would be apprehensive for using it other than the fact that not all torrent clients support video streaming while still leeching from the swarm. Or traffic shaping by their ISP's ( which can be fooled sometimes by forcing encrypted connections only or by ( obviously ) using a VPN that's ok with large bulk downloads ).

JDownloader has been a common approach that I've taken when trying to watch youtube videos on shoddy internet. It works pretty well, which is actually what led me to think of a Mega/torrent based distribution.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that takes this approach! Though I would rather avoid using it because JDownloader is like the free Vuze of the download manager software. It's slow as molasses to start; checks and "validates" plugins for the first ten seconds of start up, and the interface is mockingly convoluted to say the least.

Whatever option you take guys; make sure to diversify and keep your options available ( streaming, offline downloads via http or preferably p2p through torrent magnet links or otherwise... )

 

The problem allot of people have with torrents is not difficulty or lacking of streaming play support in the client. The problem is they way ISPs view torrent traffic, IE all torrent traffic must be transporting pirated material, and how allot of ISPs will send out cease and desist warnings to torrent users regardless of whether or not the ISP knows the content is illegal. Yes there are ways of encrypting and masking the nature of the traffic, but the people worried about ISPs taking it the wrong way, probably aren't tek savvy enough to know or figure out how to enable these features.

The other side of that, and no offense to Logan and crew, but tek syndicate is not worth the HDD space needed for offline viewing in light of a reliable streaming option like YouTube. Its the same reason no one downloads the daily news show from their favorite local tv channel and saves it for later, its only worth watching when the information/news is relevant to current events. I don't watch news clips or tek episodes from last year for the simple reason that they are no longer relevant to whats going on in the world outside of reference checking.

To put it simply, The tek is for watching as soon as possible, because its only relevant when viewed close to the publish date, thus the use of YouTube. Torrents are for what you want to keep, stuff that remains relevant regardless of how long ago it was made. For most people, The tek isn't relevant long enough to allocate HDD space for keeping episodes.

You also have too look at bandwidth costs, in order to start a decent seeding pool, you would need to upload the video anywhere from 50-100 times to various peers. Based on past experience, and assuming that the average tek episode is about 5-7GB depending on the chosen compression/format, your looking at potentially up to 700GB of upload bandwidth per episode. Disregarding the other videos they upload, that's 2,800GB of Upload bandwidth per month for just the weekly tek episode. Most users wont even DOWNLOAD more than 500GB in a month, much less upload that much. Unless Logan's got a sweet business class internet connection, I'm pretty sure he would have to dedicate his internet connection just for seeding for most of the month just to make torrentized tek episodes work.

Bottom line, its not worth it.

I want to address a few points just in case the crew consider this as a viable option for them:

I agree that The Tek becomes less relevant ( or, more accurately, less useful as information goes stale ) as time progresses, and agree that most people are likely not going to be storing old episodes of The Tek for nostalgia (me being an exception, because amusing and reasons (see The Tek 86: North of the Teeth of the World's intro...)). This isn't a strong reason though against a torrent option; most people would end up deleting the file or content after they were done with it (as I do once I'm done). Take for example BSDNow's podcast; they not only offer regular downloads of their video sessions, there are torrent options too (though the audio is not available as that type of option). Don't forget that even if The Tek doesn't benefit as much from such an option, there are other series by the crew that would (i.e. tutorials), cooking as mentioned above in the 1st post.

I also agree that bandwidth is costly ( as we well know, satanic cable companies... ). But streaming vs torrent? Data is data ( Phrases from Wendel(c)(r) ); either way, it's coming down the pipe eventually if you watch the episode in full ( seeking through is another matter ). A typical 1080p epsiode of The Tek fetched via JDownloader off of Youtube takes between 1.2 GB and 1.8 GB depending upon the length of the video. I'm sure that if the crew made their videos directly we might see an increase of 0.2 GB to 0.6 GB (+/- ~0.1GB ) because uploading to Youtube re-encodes the video that was already lossy encoded to begin with, as a trade with slightly better quality.

Now, I'm relatively sure that no sane or inexperienced person would host their website locally at their house ( there are exceptions ); more likely this is site is co-hosted at some data center or at least in Wendell's secret server lair, where bandwidth isn't exactly a problem. Such facilities have massive network infrastructure to handle the traffic. But let's assume the site isn't in a data center. I agree that it would be insane to expect 2TB of total upload bandwidth from one single system from such a connection. But that's exactly what BitTorrent was created to solve.

I'm going to use my connection as a frame of reference here, and again take your example of 50 to 100 peers on average taking the torrent option. Additionally, let's use 1.8GB as the average size of a Tek Episode. I have a 16Mb/1Mb ( ~2MB/~0.14MB) connection. Let's assume I have full utilization up and down. On average, it takes me ~15 min to get a Tek Episode using my current method. During that same time, I can contribute alone a paltry 126MB of data. That's ~14% of the total episode I contributed myself as opposed to the site doing it itself. A few people may stop seeding at this point. But many probably wont. They'll be too busy getting down and dirty with The Tek for the show's length of time ( around 30 to 45 minutes ). Again, assuming full utilization, that's another 252MB to 378MB contributed back; bumping the total percentage contributed back up to 28%. So the bandwidth problem here isn't as bad as you make it out to be.

The best valid argument I believe you have is:

Yes there are ways of encrypting and masking the nature of the traffic, but the people worried about ISPs taking it the wrong way, probably aren't tek savvy enough to know or figure out how to enable these features.

I don't see any counter-argument I can provide here for that.

Another valid argument against me would be that it's possible people may disable uploading, which would defeat the purpose of having a torrent option. It's likely though that many who actually use torrent won't do this for two reasons. Peers use a tit for tat system ( quid pro quo ); disabling uploading would cause some peers to ignore those people ( and have slower download speeds as a result ). Additionally, the super-seeding extension to BitTorrent mitigates harmful leeching behavior by allowing the main seeder ( the site ) to track whether previously seeded pieces were distributed to other peers it's connected to ( but at the expense of permanently choking the swarm when there is only one seeder and one leecher ). So they'll understand its value in this case. The other valid reason is that they're too unfamiliar to configure their client to do so.

prob. because of the userbase. I bet only 1 out of 3 active subscriber would even go to vimeo if the tek swapped and put big boards on all the videos or main page saying they moved. And the other 30% casuals would just watch like barnacules, Jayztwocentz or OC3Dtv. Just look at 3Dgameman, he was so popular he even had his own soundboard, sadly every since he swapped there's less and less of him and he's slowly inching back. I really miss his constant 2-4 day vids.