YouTube is by far the largest and the most visited video sharing resource on the Internet. Yet, there are some viable alternatives to this behemoth, some specialized, others employing similar models as YouTube. DARE takes a comprehensive look at some such alternatives.*
Ever since its inception in February 2005, YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/), founded by three former Pay Pal employees Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen and now owned by Google, has become the predominant site on the Internet for uploading and sharing videos online. It claims to cater to over a billion users globally, whhile in the US, it has nearly a 41 percent share of the video sharing market, its nearest competitor being Hulu (http://www.hulu.com/), as yet a US-only premium service. While Hulu is not available to users in the rest of the world, there are other viable alternatives to YouTube that use either the same model as YouTube or variants of it.
Before comprehensively listing all these viable alternatives, it would be pertinent to look at the generic platforms that such video sharing websites offer and how they work.
1. The ‘YouTube model’: In YouTube and several other sites like MetaCafe, Veoh, VuMe, Vimeo etc, previously loaded videos can be viewed by anyone (except if the circulation of the said video is prohibited in a certain geographical area).Videos can range from mundane home videos to professionally posted ones. Channels offering professional videos like full length movies and movie trailers, documentaries, episodes of dramas, training videos etc garner some advertising. Yet, speculative figures available in the public domain suggest that YouTube, despite having over a billion people logging in during a year, does not recover costs incurred on storage and bandwidth from its advertising revenue. Sites like Vimeo, besides offering free hosting space, also offer premium hosting at affordable rates, for prices in the range of US$6O per annum. The premium account allows you to upload videos as many times as you want in a week, with a maximum weekly quota of 5GB (1GB per film). Others like Vidoeegg use the cost per engagement (CPE) model, in which the content being uploaded is priced on how much value it generates for the advertiser.
2. The ‘Ustream model’: Sites like Ustream (http://www.ustream.tv/) allow users to stream videos live in real time. In other words, users can set up a ‘broadcasting station’ of their own, with just a webcam and a working broadband connection. Media companies and individual users also use such services to broadcast television channels from all over the world, often embedding such streams to their own sites or blogs, in the hope of generating advertising revenue during important sporting or entertainment events that are webcast.
3. Dedicated sites offering live broadcast TV: Sites like Livestation and WWITV are two of the best out of a list of several hundreds of websites that aggregate live broadcast TV streams from across the world. So, if you want to catch a certain entertainment channel out of say Albania, sitting in the comfort of your room in Delhi, all you need is a working broadband connection! Sure, the quality is often not HD and sometimes some links do not work, but then free lunches are well, never totally free, are they? Moreover, if you want to pay for such content, there are premium versions of such offerings which, upon a small fee, one time or periodic, offer high quality streaming of the same channels or of others, not dished out gratis.
Having looked at the generic models using which video sharing and streaming sites operate, it would be worthwhile to look at some viable alternatives to YouTube, which still has a predominant position in this space.
Vimeo (http://www.vimeo.com/): This is an intelligent video hosting site that helps you ideate so that you can produce interesting videos. A site meant initially for film-makers, it also allows you to limit access to your videos by altering your privacy settings accordingly. Also, videos are neatly grouped into relevant channels, something that makes navigating this site extremely easy. To put it simply, this site, which has some mature content, is one of the better alternatives to YouTube. While the casual creator can join free, the more serious creator, who wants to upload high quality content can join in as a premium user by paying a fee.
Clipshack (http://www.clipshack.com/): Run by Reality Digital Inc. it is more or less patterned on YouTube, only that it is not as exhaustive in its content as the latter.
BlipTV (http://www.blip.tv/): This is a very good source for independent shows that may otherwise never make it to the TV screen. It does however store general private videos just like YouTube does, but its claim to fame is good TV-quality content that does not make it to the airwaves.
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