Video is Coming to Reddit

Post by zitterbewegung » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 8:53 PM UTC

goeric wrote: post #41

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…

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…

Post by MBCook » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 8:58 PM UTC

pakitan wrote: post #35

MBCook wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> And you know what I would kill for? A display of how long a video is before I play it Every youtube video thumbnail has that in the lower right corner.

Post by nerfhammer » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 8:59 PM UTC

digitalzombie wrote: post #45

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, but now they have a much bigger revenue opportunity. They can't monetize videos they don't host. 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?

Post by 0xffff2 » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 9:00 PM UTC

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…

Post by EpicEng » Thu, Aug 17, 2017, 9:08 PM UTC

cheald wrote: post #29

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.

The proliferation of HTML5 video support in browsers has made the player massively less of a concern than it used to be. I recently led a move of my employer's video hosting (many TBs worth of video) from a third-party platform to an in-house solution and it was quite a lot simpler than one might expect. Video is super expensive in terms of bandwidth, but the technical pipeline for ingesting, transcoding, delivering,…