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Bringing YouTube Into Modern Era (and What's All Wrong)
We recently interviewed a number of video publishers about the qualities of YouTube in their video enterprises and the ways in which it can (and should) be adjusted to bring it into the modern era. It's a cutting edge site, no doubt about it, but there is still a handful of pretty obvious way sin which it's still lacking. Fix these problems and you'll have a mastery-grade site, no two ways about it.
Mail/Message Management - The first problem that came up came from a close friend of mine, the guy who manages the internet competition website WalkenTheWalk.com. He pointed out that he has enjoyed thousands of views, dozens of responses and hundreds of messages, but laments that the internal messaging system feels like it was crafted (and unperfected) in 1997.
No matter how many subscribers you have, you can only send about a half-dozen emails at a time, even if you aren't a spammer. Even if the thousand messages you're trying to send are in response to the thousand messages you've received from your video, you still face the spam-busting threshold of about 6-messages every 15-minutes. Fine if you’re a layman, but impossibly crippling if you're an honored publisher.
If YouTube really is run by the geniuses behind Google (and I know it because of the cleverness of the new ads I'm seeing on just about every single video,) they have got to introduce a GMail caliber mailing system.
Filtering Options - Whether you're trying to look at good videos, or just popular ones, one abuse of the system has been the publishers who post videos without any consideration for feedback. Personally, I'd like to have the ability to filter out videos so that I never see one that has ratings and comments disabled. The very notion of not permitting ratings and comments hearkens back to an era before the internet was any much good at all, and if you're a publisher or director putting such materials out there, I want to never see your products, and I want for you to know that there's a large and growing segment of the viewing populous, specifically the discerning audience, that has no desire to see your single-sided videos.
Let us decide if we only want to see official studio productions, or only those with a rating greater than three-stars. Let us decide if we want to see live concerts haphazardly captured on a cell phone compared to a studio produced song set.
Lack of television-style play lists. Even when a list of favorite videos are selected, there is no good way to just set them up to play and let them run like we'd see on television. I would argue that this is one of the critical components missing. Just because I prefer my entertainment in three minute chunks doesn't mean I only want it so compressed. Afford me some way of playing it like a regular program.
And with that said, let's get Pandora smart about it and introduce smart channels where I tell you what I like and you just play a bunch of things you think I'd like. What's wrong with that? Turns out it's very difficult, but by no means impossible, and certainly not for the brilliant likes of the Google crew. God forbid the number one video site of all time take a daring step and take a commanding lead the likes of which would simply crush all the others.
The last and arguably biggest beef comes down to how publishers are compensated, which is to say, they are not compensated at all. The guys from Eepybird landed a cherry deal with Google Vdieo before they went quietly tits up, but what about the rest of the publishers? You've got tens of thousands of directors creating hundreds of thousands of next-gen television-grade content, and you won't even offer them a pittance from the crumbs of the slice of the pie they dish up. This is a markedly lousy way to treat creators of content, and an even worse way to attract new talent.
Instead the Tubes of You are being overrun with jack-sticks with webcams posting mindless nonsense about their cats or their days, who knows what because they're so busy bringing down the average IQ of the consumer that no one can be bothered to comment as to what their effect is.
If a system for paying producers of quality content was introduced, it could effectively curtail piracy by paying the rightful owners of the content in ways that might just be agreeable. No longer would this be a reluctant consolation in the promotional world for mainstream media, but a viable clearinghouse for otherwise unused material that hasn't been profitable under other models. They could placate the big media companies, delight the smaller ones, and enhance in spades the quality of experience for the everyday users, all while churning a solid half-billion in co-promoted advertising revenue.
Of course, I'd also like to see a way by which the ever-deleted clips could remain, even with ads, so that things I loved once that enjoyed success would remain available while paying the true copyright holder. Consolidate comments, payment, views and ratings to the official clip, once the pirate is discovered. That would make everyone happy, and not just me. Don't worry about me, there's admittedly no pleasing the likes of me. Think about the world. There can be some pleasing of them.
Can't there?
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