I opened a new YouTube account recently so that I could show videos on the Warrior Forum as it seems that’s the only way you can do it.
I have to say I’ve found it quite useful. There have been a few good changes since I registered my first account a few years ago, and one of those is that you can view videos at 720p. The really interesting thing about this is that if you have the bandwidth, 720p actually loads faster than the default 360p.
Pop it up to full screen at 720p, and the quality is so good it’s getting very close to the quality I recorded it at. Great stuff.
And…
You can turn off ads!
How many videos have I watched and thought “Flaming Google putting ads everywhere!” Now I’ve found out it’s not Google at all, it’s the individual user turning them on.
You can even make videos private, although I’ve not tried that yet.
In all this now means I can do a pile of tutorial videos (optionally for staff only if I make them private I guess) and you can watch them at really high quality without sucking any bandwidth from my server.
I wonder if the whole private video thing also lets us share them automatically to individuals via an API? That would be really cool wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t need a dedicated server or Amazon S3 to store your videos for your members, you could just use YouTube’s storage and bandwidth instead.
If it’s possible, there’s another product idea eh? 😉
-Frank
