Video is Coming to Reddit

Post by corobo » Fri, Aug 18, 2017, 12:54 PM UTC

olegkikin wrote: post #79

goeric wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty simple and I always wondered why they didn't do it sooner. Reddit is already one of the most popular sites on the Internet - but since it was just an aggregator it constantly took users off their site. Now they're owning more and more of the content and keeping users there longer. Sure, video is expensive, but now they have a much bigger revenue opportunity. They can't monetize videos they don't h…

> Sure, video is expensive 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).

Post by subpixel » Fri, Aug 18, 2017, 2:18 PM UTC

koolba wrote: post #36

> If you’ve spent any time on r/HighQualityGifs, r/mealtimevideos, or just about any other Reddit community, you know that videos and gifs represent a major proportion of the content shared on our site. But prior to this launch, content creators had to go through a time-consuming, circuitous process to post videos, using third-party hosting platforms, copying URLs, and sharing them as link posts. This inhibited many…

Post by aeorgnoieang » Fri, Aug 18, 2017, 3:21 PM UTC

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…

Post by ucho » Fri, Aug 18, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #31

mandie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Image hosting is easy, if you don't care about losing money. As long as you provide direct links to images, you're better than everybody else. 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.

> nothing will ever top YouTube's 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…

Post by EpicEng » Fri, Aug 18, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

FridgeSeal wrote: post #88

EpicEng wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>extremely simple 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.

Not just the UX, the performance as well: there are few things more infuriating than going to pause an autoplaying video, but you can't, because it slows down scrolling on the whole web page. Then you finally get your mouse over it and if you're unlucky enough that the controls have disappeared you've got to wait for whatever 1 sec+ latency for them to re-appear. Then you've got to click them - an action once again,…