December Year in Review and 2023 Preview (Video)

[Chris027]

14 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

Pretty disappointing to see this proprietary cloud-only video approach. Video IS the wave and it's one of the biggest gaps to IPS.  Video is HARD, so I'm baffled as to why IPS would want to incur the cost of enhancing this with a cloud-only solution and also incur the resource and storage cost for cloud customers (driving cloud pricing up in all likelihood) versus leveraging YouTube, Vimeo, etc and their APIs to make a cloud and self hosting solution that saves everyone time and money, as well as ports video handling into the hands of companies that have already mastered it.

I support IPS avoiding YouTube, and enabling us to keep the content we create, on our own communities. I'm not a fan of giving YouTube free content to monitize and pull eyeballs away from our communities, using our content.

[Clover13]

16 minutes ago, Chris027 said:

I support IPS avoiding YouTube, and enabling us to keep the content we create, on our own communities. I'm not a fan of giving YouTube free content to monitize and pull eyeballs away from our communities, using our content.

I get that side of the coin too, but you can monetize YouTube.  Does IPS have video monetization built into video?  I haven't seen it.  You can also embed your YouTube videos into IPS and monetize around the video (literally around it), while also monetizing the video itself (within it).

I've posted an enhancement request in the past, the goal isn't to direct traffic away from our IPS communities to YouTube, it is to interface with YouTube for video handling, processing, storage and browser agnosticism...and then embed that video within our IPS content automatically.  When you upload a video to IPS (say in forums), leverage YouTube's API to upload it to a channel, then embed the YouTube URL where that attachment would otherwise go.  This is an oversimplified workflow not accounting for asynchronous behavior and post submission updates, but it seems feasible and offers stronger benefits than IPS trying to become YouTube IMHO (unless video processing/handling/storage/presentation has become easier).  Either way, video storage alone is a high cost, and YouTube frees you of that.  On top of that, YouTube has strong analytics to leverage viewership, trends, etc to learn and adapt your content.

Edited December 6, 2022 by Clover13

[Chris027]

6 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

I get that side of the coin too, but you can monetize YouTube.  Does IPS have video monetization built into video?  I haven't seen it.  You can also embed your YouTube videos into IPS and monetize around the video (literally around it), while also monetizing the video itself (within it).

I've posted an enhancement request in the past, the goal isn't to direct traffic away from our IPS communities to YouTube, it is to interface with YouTube for video handling, processing, storage and browser agnosticism...and then embed that video within our IPS content automatically.  When you upload a video to IPS (say in forums), leverage YouTube's API to upload it to a channel, then embed the YouTube URL where that attachment would otherwise go.  This is an oversimplified workflow not accounting for asynchronous behavior and post submission updates, but it seems feasible and offers stronger benefits than IPS trying to become YouTube IMHO (unless video processing/handling/storage/presentation has become easier).  Either way, video storage alone is a high cost, and YouTube frees you of that.  On top of that, YouTube has strong analytics to leverage viewership, trends, etc to learn and adapt your content.

I certainly here you, but YouTube’s goal is to get more eyeballs and keep them watching as many minutes as possible. They have buildings full of PhDs with unlimited computing power, working to accomplish that goal.
 

YouTube payouts are pennies compared to what we can make by working directly with companies who want to advertise. 

I’ve been to Google. Spent the day talking with them. It was appalling. Despite what the company says, it has zero respect for content created by any of us. The company will do whatever it can to use our content to increase the benefit for its shareholders. 

[opentype]

We had this discussion before. It was never going to be YouTube, Vimeo and the likes. They are NOT video/streaming storage providers. They are content platforms for individual content creators on those platform and viewers on those platforms. Other systems like Cloudlflare Stream would have been possible, but now that IPS is building its system around AWS, of course it makes perfect sense to include video encoding there. Everything else would be a bad idea with tons of disadvantages.

While I am very critical about the shift to the cloud offers in general, the upcoming video solution does make perfect sense as a cloud feature. I can easily accept that it will be limited to that. 

[Clover13]

13 minutes ago, opentype said:

We had this discussion before. It was never going to be YouTube, Vimeo and the likes. They are NOT video/streaming storage providers. They are content platforms for individual content creators on those platform and viewers on those platforms. Other systems like Cloudlflare Stream would have been possible, but now that IPS is building its system around AWS, of course it makes perfect sense to include video encoding there. Everything else would be a bad idea with tons of disadvantages.

While I am very critical about the shift to the cloud offers in general, the upcoming video solution does make perfect sense as a cloud feature. I can easily accept that it will be limited to that. 

I'm confused by the NOT part of YouTube, Vimeo, etc.  Have you ever seen them block or throttle embedded playback?  Why would they care?  Their ads are embedded within the videos, no?  Sure they want you to be on their site to get eyes on other videos, but I've never seen anything that would prevent one from using them as a FREE video hosting provider (in fact that's what everyone does who uses them) and sharing it in other ways whether that's on a separate website, an IPS based site, Wordpress, or whatever.

What are the disadvantages you've identified with using YouTube or Vimeo for these purposes?  The one that does indeed have merit is what @Chris027 alluded to regarding ad payouts, but the benefit of FREE storage and simplification/mastering of video processing and analytics may outweigh that for many.

I totally understand IPS' desired approach to the video hosting solution and the set of applications available on AWS to support the desired workflow, but making it a cloud-only feature once again puts self hosted clients in a corner.  This is going to be the continued nature of cloud based hosting as it will have cloud specific features available to it that self hosted does not.  It puts IPS and clients between a rock and a hard place when product decisions are made that only benefit cloud clients.  On top of that (and maybe the bar is lower today), doing video "well" has historically been a challenge.  Is this an area that is worth IPS' development time when others have already mastered it?  Again, I'm not clear on the benefits to an IPS approach, but I do see the downsides (maybe too much devil's advocate in me).

Edited December 6, 2022 by Clover13

[Dll]

YouTube is fine if all you're worried about is getting those already on your site to watch a video. Like you say it's free and it works.

But, if you want that embedded video to rank in Google for your site and not on YouTube, that's going to be challenging. It's not impossible, but properly self hosted video is way better in that respect.

[Gary]

Amazing work by the team once again! You all smashed it, and I found the chat very insightful.

On 12/2/2022 at 6:08 AM, jesuralem said:

No offense but many of us don't have time to watch a 1 hour video when we may be able to take 5 or 10 minutes to read a news or an article.

I'm not saying the video is not a good choice but it should be accompanied by a text with the main points or announcement. Basically just an image of the slides presented would be a good start.

I can definitely try and include this into one of my Invision Insight topics if it is of interest, @jesuralem?

Limiting the video when it provides so much information would be a downfall. I'm sure we'll take on board the feedback provided though. Having a short and sweet summary of the chat can definitely be achieved in some way, shape or form.