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Monthly Archives: October 2013

Rubber Duck Website

After Blip.tv gave most of it’s members the boot (see previous post), we had to find a new host for Rubber Duck Theater. We set up an account on YouTube, but YouTube is over-the-top with their copy write filters and either places ads on videos or blocks them entirely even for videos that don’t actually break any copy write laws. When you do movie reviews, you are allowed to use small snipits of movies. You can challenge YouTube, but that’s a nuisance. We did manage to upload 42 of our 45 episodes so far, but still not the best solution.

We then tried Vimeo. Their free account was useless because there was only enough space for a couple of videos, even though our online episodes are only between 300-400MB each. So we paid $60 for their “Plus” account, but this account only allows users to upload 5GB per week. A time consuming task uploading 45 episodes. But we are up to episode #31 as of today, and so far no copy write issues like YouTube. Vimeo also has a pro account, but it’s more than we want to spend for our public access non-profit videos.

Then we thought why not host the videos ourselves and not deal with these video sharing sites? We already have several hosting accounts for various projects. But this can really put a strain on hosting bandwidth. Our best solution so far is to host the actual videos on Amazon’s servers. Amazon offers lots of server space and very it’s very inexpensive. So, we’ve uploaded our episodes to an Amazon Web Service (AWS) “S3” account and linked the videos to this blog powered by WordPress on a 1and1.com hosting account. It’s nice to have full control over our content and no annoying ads to deal with.

Our Community TV station is also working on videos on demand, so we hope to have our show at graftontv.org as well. Still more work to do on this site and also need to update our Facebook account, which is all linked to blip.tv. So, that is where we are at now.

Links

Blip.tv

blip_logo

For three years we’ve been hosting Rubber Duck Theater (RDT) on blip.tv. Forty four episodes have been hosted on Blip and linked to other sites around the web like Facebook, Twitter and our personal blogs. Last month out of the blue, I got the following message from Blip:

Over the past year, Blip has been conducting an ongoing review of our content library, removing accounts that don’t meet our Terms of Service. As part of this effort, your account has been flagged for removal on November 7, 2013, and new uploads have been disabled as of today.

I thought there must be some mistake as RDT does not brake any Terms of Service! I emailed Blip to try to clear up this error and got this reply:

Blip requires that all its videos be part of a high quality, episodic, original web series. Please refer to Section 11 of Blip’s Terms of Service for more information about prohibited content:

11. Prohibited Content: Videos that are not part of a high quality, original episodic web series can be removed at Blip’s sole discretion.

In other words, we don’t like your stuff and we can remove whatever we don’t like. How rude and insulting!

Well, after a bit of research it turns out that Blip has actually snubbed over 80% of it’s users! Seems Blip has decided only to keep their big money making “Core Webseries” producers while giving the boot to it’s “lesser” accounts who actually helped to make them successful.

Obviously, Blip can do what ever it wants, but it’s the way they did it that is annoying. Basically Blip is telling users we don’t care about you and we can do whatever we want. Here is the canned reply that many users got from Blip:

“We suggest moving to a more general platform such as YouTube or Vimeo for your needs.”

So, to anyone who cares, I hereby boycott blip.tv / blip.com and ask you to do the same. They don’t care about their users, all they care about is making money for themselves.

Now begins the work of moving 3 years worth of videos to a new host and fixing hundreds of links. Thanks Blip…NOT!