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Video is Coming to Reddit

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Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#61

Post by vit05 »

I think Reddit should focus on short videos first. A middle term between a gif and a youtube video that would be perfect on any smartphone. Video is very expensive and there are very few examples of companies that profit by hosting without having a pay subscription system. In fact, every big video platform is trying to make easier for content creators profit from their creations. Reddit doesn't have any idea how to make money now, and will not be able to help others. Make great content with regularity is expensive.

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.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#62

Post by zamalek »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
zamalek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > especially those who capture videos on their phones 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 h…

> They will also have to deal with DCMA (historically, the content hosts have), which means hiring people to vet false claims. 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 specifica…

The Reddit userbase would demand it, is my point.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#63

Post by symlinkk »

mulmen wrote: post #49
pgrote wrote: post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? 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.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. 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…

I don't understand why it's so hard, you can just use the HTML5 tag and then bam, you've got a polished and bug-free video player.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#64

Post by eric_h »

0xffff2 wrote: post #58
gallerdude wrote: post #12

I think it's obvious why they're doing this - accessibility. In moving r/all to r/popular, image hosting, removing default subs, and now this, they're trying to cater to more people. 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…

>especially acronyms: ITT, OP, TIL, etc None of those originated or where even popularized by reddit AFAIK...

Perhaps not, but they are, of course, extremely common there.

As an aside, I do believe the acronym ELI5 was coined and popularized on reddit (though the phrase itself did not originate there).

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#65

Post by mmanfrin »

Youtube does not yet make money. This is such a windmillfight, I just don't understand why Reddit thinks adding a cost-sink will help.

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.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#66

Post by cookiecaper »

niftich wrote: post #32
pgrote wrote: post #2

What is the end game for Reddit? Control of the videos so they can sell ads, right? 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.

Definitely control of videos so they can sell ads, but also an effort to cultivate a captive ecosystem and reduce reliance on outside sites. These largely circle back to 'sell ads', but it's too drastic to suggest that it doesn't benefit the community. It, however, does continue the process of changing its character. Captive content ecosystems, despite their widely-recognized drawbacks, aren't devoid of engagement. V…

How long until, like Twitter, reddit puts the bulk of its content behind a login? It's transforming itself into another walled garden like everything else, because that's the way to get paid.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#67

Post by paulcole »

parthdesai wrote: post #43
j-walker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get what they're plan is. "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.

Looks like i'll have to remove reddit from whitelisted sites on my ad-blocker. Sigh.

Why? They're hosting content you want to see? Can't you just watch their ads?

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#68

Post by mulmen »

symlinkk wrote: post #63
mulmen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. 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…

I don't understand why it's so hard, you can just use the HTML5 tag and then bam, you've got a polished and bug-free video player.

You're kidding right? What about the CDN? Does anyone actually use a plain html5 tag for playback? Is that what Facebook and news sites like NYT and CNN are using? Is that what Reddit will use?

Outside Youtube I can't think of a single video player I would even call usable, forget polished.

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#69

Post by wolfgang42 »

symlinkk wrote: post #63
mulmen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback is hard . Does Reddit have the technical resources to make this work? Only a handful of companies have pulled it off. 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…

I don't understand why it's so hard, you can just use the HTML5 tag and then bam, you've got a polished and bug-free video player.

It's nowhere near that simple. I wrote a video player which only had to support three clients (Win7+IE, Win7+Chrome, and iPad Safari) and it still took me weeks to get it working right. Here's a whole post I wrote about the transcoding settings alone: http://www.linestarve.com/blog/post/rendering-html5-video-wi...

Re: Video is Coming to Reddit

#70

Post by sergiotapia »

paulcole wrote: post #67
parthdesai wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like i'll have to remove reddit from whitelisted sites on my ad-blocker. Sigh.

Why? They're hosting content you want to see? Can't you just watch their ads?

Some people consider ads immoral and predatory. If we're lucky enough to know how insidious they are, and have the means to block them, we should.
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