…and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men …
Welp. Here I had been recommending VideoEgg as a possible solution to all my students/trainees, because it offered a dead-bang easy way to upload and host your videos, the EULA wasn’t as onerous as YouTube, and they were actually trying to incorporate a shared-revenue video ad model to their services.
Looks like that was a little bit more than they could chew.
Imagine my surprise and delight when I read this:
Why and when is my.videoegg.com being decommissioned?
As you know, resources at technology startups are limited and it is in
our best interest to focus on the core of our business at this time.
With a wide range of video destination sites available on the market,
we feel that we
are leaving you in good hands.The last day for my.videoegg.com is May 31, 2008
Thanks a pantload, guys. I have a couple dozen videos that I’ve embedded on this blog and on other sites around the web, that I laboriously uploaded, tagged and verified with VideoEgg. And in less than two weeks, they all go bye-bye? They give some real dingbat directions as to how to get your videos off their site – “Just click the “Download This Video” link. Again, thanks. No batch processing? I get to do this one after the other? Happy happy joy joy.
What I can salvage from this dog’s breakfast is the lesson that internet companies come and go … mostly go … especially in the online video space … and that you have to really keep an eye on your content. You can use the sharing sites for non-mission-critical clips, but the very nature of web startups means that one day, as in the instant case here, all your content could go “poof!” Which is a Bad Thing for a newspaper site. I had been hoping to offer the fledgling web operations in places like Kiev, Colombia, Russia, heck, smalltown America, with a good solution to the revenue vs. bandwidth cost problem of hosting news video clips, aka the “Be Careful What You Wish For” case study of what having a viral video hit can do to the bill from your ISP at the end of the month.
They do recommend Vimeo (which looks a little cheesy), Blip.tv (which violates Rule #1 of a multimedia site by blaring obnoxious sound the second the page is loaded), and of course, good ol’ drinking-from-the-firehose, All-Your-Base-Belong-To-Us YouTube. Guess I’m going to have to start pushing the revenue model offered by Revver… even if by the time you get to #18 of their top 20 most-viewed of all time, you’re dropping below a million views. Hey, what can I say? I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog.