YouTube 10th Anniversary: Competition Puts Site on the Defensive | Hacker News Reader

YouTube 10th Anniversary: Competition Puts Site on the Defensive

variety.com

14 pointsprostoalex10 comments

On the world wide web, jumping to Hulu, an explicitly US-only site that blocks all of the rest of the world, is a bad decision overall.

I guess everyone else will be pirating that new series if they want to watch it. He's made that choice. Sorry, FreddieW, whoever you are, on one level I kind of hope it doesn't work out for you: balkanisation of the world wide web is not really something I want to encourage and thrive.

Fortunately, the whole point of going to Hulu was that he doesn't have to count the nickels coming in through youtube ad revenue. I for one welcome networks and digital media companies paying creators for their work. If Hulu loses ad money because they don't let certain countries watch, then that's their own business problem, and one that is almost certainly due to the cost associated with licensing, which is the fault of the countries involved.

I can't watch KBS World live on youtube because I live in the US and there's a TV station for that. I don't blame KBS, because it's not their decision, it's a product of the legal requirements they must meet to continue to operate, and I enjoy the content.

I only go to youtube nowadays so I can copy the URL for the video into youtube-dl.

Youtube desperately needs to be disrupted. As soon as advertisements were placed in between videos (before they were unskippable), someone should've begun work on a decentralized youtube-killer.

it's now 3 years since Youtube should've been made obselete, and I'm starting to worry if I have to scratch the itch myself.

I notice a lot of people that used to watch silly videos on Youtube are now watching them on their Facebook stream just because it's re-shared by their friends. The fact that videos autoplay by default is attracting people to watch it right then instead of clicking a link to Youtube.

I know this is absolutely the wrong place to complain about that, but I really really hope Facebook will stop having its videos as Flash-only.

It's such a "blast from the past" to see the "Flash plugin not installed" everytime someone shares a video.

The worse problem is videos autoplaying - using, wasting my bandwidth for videos I may not open.

You can turn that off, you know.

(For example by disabling Flash :))

I know that. I'm referring to his "facebook should switch from flash."

If facebook switches to HTML5 I'll not be happy. Because, there's no easy way to disable video autoplay. I've asked multiple times on HN but I've still not gotten a way to do that - except Youtube (there's an extension for that.)

  var videoElements = document.getElementsByTagName("video");
  
  for (var videoElement of videoElements) {
    videoElement.removeAttribute("autoplay");
  }

...in a Userscript ought to do it. HTML5 gives more power to those who can write code than we had with Flash.

That said, this does not qualify as easy for most users. If there is enough demand for a "never autoplay" feature among users, browers ought to implement an option in the user interface. It is not a good reason for keeping Flash around.

For some reason, I cannot reply to your latest comment

You can turn off autoplay easily here

https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=videos

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