Is YouTube harming TV pres sites?

Yes I know this should be in Media Websites, but there I don't have the ability to add a poll. So...

Chatting to a fellow TV pres site webmaster in recent days has made me aware of something which I suppose I had noticed but hadn't quite put my finger on. Since the arrival of YouTube, there seems to have been a reduction in the amount of submissions to sites like TV Ark. This certainly seems to be the case in some areas; looking through YouTube, there is a wealth of previously unseen Schools presentation and clips while we have struggled to find much material in this genre in recent years. Even hitherto loyal supporters of pres sites such as Greg Taylor are now opting to YouTube their pres material rather than keep it for sites like the Ark or MHP.

One one hand it's understandable that people would use a facility which allows them to upload at their own convenience rather than put the tapes in the post. On the other, there are the technical quality issues associated with YouTube and the fact that internet TV presentation sites, some of which have been around for years, are distracted in their aim of being online museums in the subject. So can YouTube and pres sites work together, or is the former hurting the status quo?

It's not YouTube harming pres sites, it's pres sites harming pres sites. To me, MHP and YouTube work because it gives a freedom the older sites do not. You don't need to wait for the webmasters to get to making it available, it's transparent and as long as you've got the right kit it's easy to do what TV Ark, TV Whirl or The TV Room can't.

Not saying there's no place for the "museum" sites as such but they might end up finding that these user content sites can do a better job of it. I feel MHP (to clarify, MHP refers to the Private Parts section, not the main site) is the best place to go if you're looking for pres as there's stuff there I'm not going to find at Youtube or TV Ark but it's not complete by a longshot. Neither is anywhere else but it's the idea that someone with rare audio, video or images in their collection could make it available when they want to keeps me coming back.

The future is clearly in people uploading their own clips and it's something the old sites will have to cope with however that may be, possibly some hybrid site bridging the gap between the established sites and the user content driven sites without the ego, archaic restrictions on video size or the everlasting wait for the damn thing to update. Pres sites cannot hold onto the notion that more DOGs and smaller sizes will somehow combat YouTube because if anything they're damaging themselves in order to prevent something that is intrinsic to the internet anyway. People will go wherever it is easiest and most likely to get things, just got to be that place and if it means doing a deal with the devil then that's how it'll be.

My two pence.

Youtube is like anything else on the internet. A tool to be used or abused, and it can be done both by users and the pres sites. Myself I have plenty of plans on ways to go in the future and strange bridging ideas, it's just getting together to actually finish them (full time job and all that). I actually find one of the best uses of the tool is seen on one of the newer sites mentioned here, if they still do it. Rather than the old way of embedding a Youtube clip, they've added a local flash player which calls in the video directly. The overall result if you get to rape Youtube's bandwidth, get all the promotion of clips on YT linking to yourself, and don't have to link anything back to them.

Youtube may be a pest and I hate it, but like everything else it just needs keeping in perspective. Sure there's a lot of good content there which doesn't go on the pres sites anymore and that's a shame, but in %age terms the amount of good content that appears compared to the amount of complete and utter tosh on these sites is tiny. In that regard, the dedicated sites, with people who actually know what they're doing and how to provide a fine resource which interests will always have a future. Youtube has a sniff of being just another fad like Myspace, Facebook etc etc anyway, and combined with all the pending lawsuits, which one is more likely to be around in the long term.

The issue with pres sites, is that it's someone else's editing/curating which decides what you see. I have (but have never got around to submitting sadly) a wonderful gem from late 1988 TSW which survived by accident. It's the last 15 minutes of blockbusters (with the short 'non hand jive' end credits which may not be as iconic but nevertheless are still historically interesting yet never thought worthy of uploading), the cool animated Central endcap on the end, TSW next caption, 3 minutes of period adverts, a long in vision link from Ian Stirling into a complete ITN 545 bulletin, along with the first 10 minutes or so of TSW Today.

All of that recording is potentially interesting to different groups of people (not necessarily people even interested in pres - what about those interested in recent history who could have access to a complete national news bulletin from almost 20 years ago?). I can upload (in sections at least) the entire thing if I wanted to, and people can get what they want from it. On top of all of that, the junkie enthusiast could watch that all as a continuous sequence of how TV worked and was presented then, wheras on a pres site it would be divided up and the way in which it all connected together originally woulud be lost.

If I were to submit it to a site like TV Ark, my recording would be at the mercy of what the editor decided was important - and all encoded at lower quality into the bargain.

I do respect what sites like TV Ark did in the earlier 2000's when YouTube didn't exist, and although it must seem like a kick in the teeth to feel essentially dumped by a group of pres enthusiasts who use to depend on them for material, perhaps they still remember that they do have a role to play as a long-term online archive and museum.

Perhaps also they could use sites like YouTube to monitor whether or not their editing stance is delivering what people want - I personally find credit sequences just as interesting as titles; you often get to hear different mixes of theme tunes (or longer versions), get to see period endcaps which are just as iconic but often forgotten, or get to monitor the way crediting developed over the years, yet no archive site I can think of bothers to have more than a select few clips of end credits.

Although it's a shame that the Kudos of once killer destinations like TV Ark have been taken away, but on the other hand there are certain things which Youtube does better (and sorry for mentioning it twice, but encoding quality has to be at the top of the list), and maybe they could learn from that - one thing I would do is move to allowing contributers the option of choosing (within reason) which parts of their submission are used rather than an editor deciding what he wants to take.

And re: the issue of people just uploading to YouTube rather than submitting to a site - perhaps reciprocate what's allready happening. I can't help but notice that an awful lot of pres clips on YouTube are stolen from TV Ark - so maybe if TV Ark (or any other pres site) sees something worth having on Youtube, they should nab it and put it on their site. Morals surely don't really come much into play when copyright is almost always being breached anyway (Schools TV is the only site I can think of which actually had copyright holder permission for it's material).

i don't understand why tv-ark etc don't upload all their videos to youtube and embed them into their pages. that way it preempts the parasites who are (almost) web snatching content, and would ensure the content linked back to tv-ark, where users could navigate to see narrative and images relating to the video.

on a much smaller scale, in the past i used to upload .rm videos for posting on this forum, but found that other users were uploading them to youtube. nothing essentially wrong with that, but it does make you wonder if you have taken the time to record, digitise, encode and upload something, only for someone else to take the credit. so now i simply upload straight to youtube.

the era of tiny real player files due to bandwidth issues surely should be a thing of the past. also the fact it is less easy to rip from youtube is an argument for doing away with those incredibly annoying dogs and stings that tv-ark put on the clips.

I appreciate what you are saying about pres sites leaving the matter of what we see to the editor's discretion. At TV Ark we try to provide a broad selection of everything that is discussed in this thread; titles, end credits, continuity - but it does all have to fit into "the system" somehow. That is, programme titles on programme pages etc.

Bandwidth issues would prevent us from uploading a continuous chunk of television, such as the second half of Blockbusters into the news as was mentioned above. But we CAN at least make sure our shorter clips are given higher quality encoding. And yes, no-one expected the DOGs etc. to prevent our clips ending up on YouTube but the hope was that people would be able to identify where they came from and hopefully visit us.

As to the issue of "lifting" YouTube material, this is a no-no for me as I've spent years promoting netiquette in this direction. The best we can do, if we see an exceptional piece of pres we think TV Ark should get its hands on, is to contact the YouTube contributor to ask if an exchange of material could take place.

I think it's had an affect, the only real non affiliated to YouTube pres sites that are left seem to be only the PP, TV Ark and The TV Room, and to be fair it's not been easy for the last two in the last 18 months or so. About this time in 2001 or 2002 there were loads and loads of pres sites about, and now they've all gone. (Jim Edwards' TV World, Round The Regions, ITV Southern England, A Tribute to TV-am, The Continuity Booth, Identz - all to name a few)

I think the cost must be a frustrating one, TV Ark doesn't look like a cheap site to run at all, where as people who upload to YouTube do it for free and the main fact is that the quality is reasonable and it's approach is universal, ie it doesn't require anything like Real Player or Windows Media, just a short flash update.

I sent a DVD to TV Ark over 2 years ago now, it featured the opening titles to Countdown, which I sent as it was requested on the TV Ark Forum at the time, not too long after Richard Whiteley's death. So I thought I'll kill two birds with one stone and put some more stuff on there that would be of interest to TV Ark, other than the Countdown clips nothing else has ever been used on TV Ark, it feels kind of frustrating, but on the same level I can understand why, simply because it's very time consuming.

I think for me YouTube is brilliant, as I can share my clips onto the World, for next to nothing and I know that they'll be able to be seen by many many people. And I just do it at my own time and Leisuire, although the whole process is very time consuming.

Plus it makes you realise how many other people on this Forum have aload of gems in their VHS/DVD acrhives, ie Col and nok32uk.

Video formats can vary in how easily thay can be downloaded or converted respectively, depending on available software/plugins. But all of them can be snatched and uploaded elsewhere, and until some method is invented to keep files on a presentation site fully 'locked down' to prevent snatching, that won't change.

That is why, at this point in time I fully sympathize with any decisions to brand video from a particular site with its opening sting or logo, to both identify the real source of the clip, and also rightly promote the site itself. In my view it is the most that can really be done in this situation, to counteract any persons not giving credit where it is due.

I mainly agree with Nini, it's so much easier to put clips on YouTube than it is to submit it to pres sites.

Also, the use of Flash to display the videos also helps, which immediately makes it more easily accessable and quicker to use due to the widespred useage of Flash Player. I would rather play something in Flash than the awfully bloated Real Player which still seems to be a favourite among pres sites.

Thankfully, the latest version of Flash Player (currently in beta) has native support for H.264, which works very well, so I'm hoping when it's released that the pres sites will switch to H.264 with the option to download or play in Flash, makes live a lot easier for everyone as well as improving the quality.

H.264 is still largely overrated though, and I should know as I use it on my site. Quicktime seems to play it, but all the other major players seem to be still natively waiting. Windows Media Player 11 *still* didn't look to have added support, and even the last version of RealPlayer which claims to play MPEG4, didn't have support for the H.264 extensions (They're supposed to be there for RP11 Beta, but I stopped checking their software ages back). Maybe when the format is a little more widespreadly usable, then it'll be adopted more.

On www.nztvpres.com I embed videos like this http://nztvpres.com/tvone/id-weareone.php .. I just upload them to YouTube then get the link and put it in the flash player.

yes nztvpres.com looks like tvuk.co.nr. I designed them both

That is the current problem with H.264 at the moment, unless you install the DirectShow filter to play it in WMP, you're restricted to just Quicktime and VLC really. That's why I'm hopeful with native support for it being added to Flash Player, as it means such sites will be able to play such videos in Flash and not worry about who can and can't play it. The main reason I want a switch to H.264 is it is quite simply a far superior format to Real.