TV after YouTube
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YouTube made two fascinating announcements recently: 1) viewers are now downloading an average of two billion videos per day on the service, and; 2) YouTube is almost showing a profit for Google, its owner. Think about the glorious inefficiency embodied in that latter statement: two billion downloads per day just to break even. And this is supposed to be the future of television? Hardly.
I think the future of television is Veetle.
Veetle, if you haven’t heard of it, is a Palo Alto-based startup that isn’t nominated for this summer’s Startup Tour. Veetle appears from my vantage point to be a peer-to-peer video distribution system that most closely parallels the current cable TV model except applied to the Internet. Veetle video channels can be viewed in a browser (32-bit plug-in required) and present — just like CNN — a continuous stream of programming that can’t be interrupted, paused, or changed and can’t be very easily recorded, either.
In fact a Veetle channel very well could be CNN, because almost anyone can become a Veetle broadcaster by just grabbing a video feed from their DVD player or cable box and throwing it up on the web in glorious H.264. Veetle is an adolescent cesspool of intellectual property confusion but that’s part of what makes it so much fun.
Now here is why I think Veetle is the future of television. I have been writing about this particular topic (the future of television) since 1997 and while a lot has changed much has not. Sure, bandwidth is a thousand times cheaper than it was. Sure, codecs are better as are PCs. But the two core issues of: 1) how to maintain intellectual property rights for web video, and; 2) how to make money with web video, are no more answered today than they were back in the days of broadcast.com when Mark Cuban suckered Yahoo into thinking he had all the answers when of course he did not.
But in my view Veetle actually does have many of the answers.
Here’s why. YouTube has those two billion downloads per day yet just manages to break even. Commercial TV has less than two billion viewers per day, yet manages to be a very profitable industry with at least $20 billion in annual sales. The question to ask is not why YouTube is so popular by why it is so unprofitable? It is unprofitable because most of the content is crap. It is unprofitable because distribution costs are still too high. It is unprofitable because the ad model isn’t clear. It is unprofitable because the average video is still less than four minutes long so this is not a medium for story telling in any strict sense. Oh, and did I mention that the content is crap?
Commercial or even non-commercial TV, in contrast, may be too dumb, too simple, and too obvious for the most part, but not all of it is crap. Find a way to reach the non-crap while preserving the best of traditional TV and you’ll have something. You’ll have Veetle.
Pre-Veetle, the video distribution models were buying or renting from iTunes, watching with commercials on Hulu or TV.com in a system subsidized by the writers and actors unions, watching with some ads on YouTube, or just plain watching (crap) on many different sites. None of those models, however, have Veetle’s key feature of being easy to watch but hard to hack, easy to attend but hard to ignore. You can’t pause it, you can’t record it, you just have to watch it, like broadcast or cable TV pre-TiVO. And that makes it an ideal commercial medium and one very good for preserving intellectual property rights, unlike all those others.
The aha! moment with Veetle is when you realize it is just like having a cable TV system with a million channels. Along with the bad porn (Veetle really needs parental controls, guys) and European football on Veetle is a loop from some user running every episode of The Big Bang Theory, which of course I love. There are something like 66 episodes, but it could be just as easy with Veetle to have 66 channels each one episode deep.
And of course there is the p2p aspect of the service, which lowers Veetle’s bandwidth to around 700 kbps-per-continuous channel. Compare that to YouTube with two billion 350 kbps downloads at 3:30 each for the calculated equivalent of 2.4 MILLION Veetle channels. No wonder YouTube barely makes a profit even with zero content cost.
I could throw my 13 old episodes of NerdTV up on Veetle in full resolution, running them in a loop with a couple of commercials in each episode, and not only would I entertain people, I’d put my three kids through private schools on the proceeds. There is no way — no way– I could do that on YouTube.
That’s where Veetle gets it and YouTube doesn’t, because this particular option isn’t really available on YouTube, which remains an expensive distribution system in search of a viable programming model.
I can see how Veetle would grow to be a $20 billion replacement for traditional TV, but I can’t see how YouTube could ever do it.
I don’t watch TV any more in the traditional sense. It started when my wife went to school and we were stretched thin on income. My TV died and I couldn’t afford to replace it. I dropped my cable to basic basic, returned the cable box and when the TiVo subscription ran out I cancelled it. I am about to cancel cable entirely as the Internet gives me all I need. I have Boxee hooked up to a smaller TV or I just use Boxee on a computer. I buy a couple of season passes for top tier iTunes shows but just scrape and view with Boxee. I have a few weeks at least before ABC, NBC, CBS, pull web content from their sites so I can watch when I want.
I control my time not the TV broadcast schedule. I have choice and I have pause. Boxee is just an aggregator that scrapes content and gives you central control of your streamed video.
I have time to GASP read a book or play music. I get my news online. I play games.
I want to ultimately get all my content from the Net on demand. With commercials if it keeps it free. Buying high quality content from iTunes or other sources. PrimeTime is not my time. I hate that I can’t Ala Carte the channels I want from cable and have to go with a package.
My future of IPTV would be
http://freetubetv.net
Needs some type of search and tv guide though.
And yes porn there is pretty hot.
wwwpirate said: “My future of IPTV would be….”
your joking right , your having a laugh ?, that site and SO MANY like it are utter crep….
virtually all the streams at your given URL are super low CIF or worse mpeg2 or super fuzzy divx/Xvid codec encodes of such low quality and bitrate their not even worth watching on even a low screen size as you might find on a generic mobile phone.
up-scaled to a basic PC 20″ LCD monitor or HD TV makes these streams worthless and a total waste of download and the streamers Unicast upload bandwidth
veetle and x264 AVC/H.264 are the ONLY option Today if your care about visual quality at a given lower bitrate as supplied by your ISP, end of story….
I’m done with cable tv. Now that my 3 year old has outgrown Nick Jr and moved onto the other kid channels, he is being bombarded with really obnoxious ads ALL THE TIME. Veetle sounds kinda futurey and stuff but I’ll check it out.
What other options are people using to get off cable? Roku? NetFlix? Amazon? This is my plan to cut the coax but would love to hear if there are better options.
Your amigo, Esteban!
Veetle is no friend of the internet community. It appears there is nothing Veetle can do about filtering, password protecting or separating your family from live streaming Porn. Sounds hot huh? Not really. These secret broadcasters only have to place an innocent thumbnail and click there it is. A tonsil close-up of some bedraggled woman in a cheesy motel room. Whoops! Too late. Your son, mother and wife witness the bottom of the porn barrel. There is no control. The family filter is a joke. Thats right. You have no control options. Veetle provides no self-regulating; no intention of self-regulating and the crap will continue. No, I am not a prude but please make my porn private.
Fortunately enough I´m not a new born christian or any other kind of fanatic. The point being is that I can care less if my mother or my husband sees some lite porn.
My only concern will be with my daughter, but luckily she is old enough to have seen some tits already and she only tunes in channels that I tell her so.
On the other hand I never saw hard core porn in Veetle so again, I don´t care about censorship of parental control which never worked fine anyway.
I also disagree with your view of making “your porn private”. Maybe that is your real problem: you want to keep everything for yourself, even sex. C’mon get out of the closet and practice some good healthy sex with your wife and stop banging you penis.
What planet are you on Darleene? What you call lite porn can only be described as trash. In Darleene’s world a live stream menage d t oral climax is considered LITE and appropriate for mix company viewing. Oh, you missed that one? Well, stay tuned. I’m sure click considerations will determine reviving those popular old time favorites called, “Lite Porn”.
I do believe we live in the same planet, but one thing is sure: we don´t watch the same Veetle.
I have been watching many channels for many months here and never ever had seen any LITE PORN or otherwise.
What the heck are you talking about? Benny Hill?
So that makes me wonder where you get your paycheck from. Warner? Sony?
FO
[...] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » TV after YouTube [...]
I really like netflix. Stick it on DVD and send out the damn disc. User base of everyone in the country practically. Technology cost of $20 for a DVD player. Distribution cost of ~50cents. Subscription based.
Plus watch instantly, which actually saves them
money because the postage stamp and handling physical items is more expensive.
They could easily overlay a micropayment system. I’m not sure what the DVD / streaming redistribution for rental laws / contracts are. But content providers can get paid.
Remember that netflix also has a content production company and they make some content –low budget but the content isn’t crap.
Just like I have no idea how pro sports athletes make so much money (actually, have you noticed how much more ad time there is during games compared to 20 years ago?), bigtime stars and big budget movies will still be made so long as they make money. And people will still go to the movies even if the price goes
to $20.
What amazes me is that there is still much of a new movie market. New movies, if they competed against old movies, would mostly lose. I think this is the greater reality. Old episodes of a -team, lost, 90s movies— these are pretty good and don’t require the huge extra costs of new production.
But it’s not just a question of content being good. A big part of the western world wants to make sure they’re watching what everyone else is watching. and new movies and tv shows succeed at coordinating water cooler talk. With this said, even network tv will keep surviving for another generation.
Then we will get so used to the fragmentation of tv and movie interests, maybe we won’t need networks and movie studios to tell us what’s good. Hahaha. That won’t happen. Even as we celebrate individuality in social networking,etc. We still want our clans, our leaders, and the mimicry which will be defined by the sports or programs we consume.
P2p might be the tech that runs the future, but I think the tech isn’t the key to what content model succeeds. Though getting costs down is important. Google probably has some p2p protocol worked out where a central server will help with bandwidth if the peers are unreliable. But getting people to participate in that gets iffy; remember that skype tried to do that at one point and it backfired. Google might be willing to buy your excess bandwidth, but it’s much cheaper to just procure it themselves. Sure–bandwidth to the home is “free”, but if they rolled out something that used up all the excess bandwidth, they’d either get blocked, force the ISP to change their pricing plan, or run the ISPs out of biz. P2p is not great for content delivery at the google scale without having ISPs reconsider their pricing.
Hey BOB Did you not see the SAP?Sybase thing coming?
So how is Veetle better/different than Justin.Tv? Or is it just the free porn or do you have a thing against paul graham funded startups?
I’m afraid they aren’t going anywhere if they can’t pay for the bandwith to be covered from getting featured on a blog.
I just watched some Netflix HD titles on a Vizio 55″ with its built in Netflix app and it was damn impressive. I swear I couldn’t tell the difference between that and Blu-Ray. That having been said, the first thing my kid sister asked me is if the Vizio had a built in YouTube app.
Most countries in the third world never respects intellectual property rights. piracy is so rampant in asian countries.’”‘
Veetle was good at the beginning but recently it keeps freezing and you never see the channels actually. They should improve the veetle or put it away and give up.
Veetle should partner up with PlayON. Veetle would be the perfect addition to the playon media server lineup. Veetle is one of my favorite websites providing the BEST Internet HD content on the net hands down. I even have went out and purchased a Quad 4 new PC with HDMI video out connections because I am so impressed with the picture quality that Veetle can provide. Playon and Veetle are the future of TV in my opinion. Check it out there for a free 14 day trial for PlayOn at http://www.playon.tv/playon With the skyrocketing cost of Cable DVR and rental fees, I was able to downgrade my cable bill by over $130 a month and still have wonderful televsion content, in this case even more choices than my Cable company could ever offer. Anyone who has a Playstation 3, Xbox , or any DLNA compatible device needs to take the time to try out this new technology that PlayOn can provide. Trust me its worth the time to try this out especially in this economy it can save you a lot of money off your present monthly viewing bills. If Veetle becomes part of the PlayOn lineup all I got say to is it will be a HUGE homerun for those who want to CUT the cable or take down that satellite dish. The internet TV revolution is well under way and is a viable threat to the Cable and Satellite services that we have today as the original cable service that came online back in the late 1970′s was to free Network TV. I watch over 85% of my viewing on by big screen HDTV’s through the Playon media server on 2 PS3′s and 1 Xbox and my dedicated PC that I use for Veetle viewing. Give it a try you might be very surprised at whats available. Veetle PLEASE partner up with PlayON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jack
Why should I buy PlayOn when I can watch it all for free on diffenent channels. For instance I watch Burn Notice and these programs are available free. NCIS , Daly, msnbc. I want internet not television
Mike in response to your comments, it is very true at times that channels freeze and it becomes upseting trying to watch. You have to remember that the broadcasters are people just like you and me that are trying to provide content and it all boils down to their uploading PC processing power, their internet bandwidth upstream power and then on the the viewers side the internet download power and their PC processing power. These dynamics all have to come together perfectly for the streams to work flawlessly. When I first started using veetle there were only about 20 channels running max about 10 months ago. Now that that they have become popular the streams have increased by 500% to at times well over 100 channels. As far as I know The Veetle servers have been upgraded once and Im sure they will have to do it again. I notice problems with freezing and such once they hit the 100 channels on their servers. Hopefully this will be addressed soon to once more make Veetle the best it can be!!!!!!!!!!!
Bob, I went and checked out veetle.com on your recommendation. I feel like I’ve been lured into Napster and should go get a lawyer Just In Case. I had a great time watching 15 or 20 minutes of “2001″, then started to think to myself, “what’s the license model for this stuff?” It seems to be the usual file sharing situation, where you post video you have hanging around and hope no RIAA Nazis or similar are hanging out. I read the EULA and saw nothing up front about what you could or could not post. (Maybe there’s something additional for those who DO post.) I dunno; guys like you are capable of greater levels of abstraction and have greater vision than I do. But veetle scares me.
I am fortunate to have found this web page. Keep up the knowledgeable postings.
Wow .. I just checked the site and I can say that this is the greatest collection of unlicensed video streams I have ever seen. How long will these guys stay out of trouble ? It seems that not one channel is user generated content. Every one of them is pirated !
You lost me at:
“a continuous stream of programming that can’t be interrupted, paused, or changed and can’t be very easily recorded, either.”
Go sell it to the Flintstones; in the modern world interruptible media that can be played on my schedule & device of choice is as essential as a phone without wires…
All these people who are replying thinking they are are so tech savy if you just heard of veetle through this article you are way way way way way way way behind.
Batch extract audio from a video file (FLV to MP3; MPEG to MP3; AVI to MP3 …)
Muy interesante! Aprendí mucho leyéndolo, muchas gracias. Por si te interesa, yo administro un sitio con articulos sobre Televisiones Baratas.
So I’m wondering what you think about GoogleTV and the youTube LeanBack app.
But, audio does not work on Veetle 90% of the time.
And when writing to veetle.com, have never received reply…
all good and well to say the future is veetle.
when i try and stream veetle it pixel outs to max, streams i
try and watch just ‘stop, freeze or pixel up some…
but on the other hand….
justin tv doesn’t do any of this.
veetle being the future of tv is a ‘pretty good furfy’ i reckon
I am not sure if anyone else have experienced this. Yesterday when I was happily watching a world cup live match, the broadcast suddenly stopped in the midst of the game and a message said that content was in breach of copyright.
The other lower quality streaming sites have not been interupted this way as far as I had experienced. Of course the other sites streaming quality is bad.
@ way2graphic, you said, “Veetle is no friend of the internet community. It appears there is nothing Veetle can do about filtering, password protecting or separating your family from live streaming Porn. Sounds hot huh? Not really. These secret broadcasters only have to place an innocent thumbnail and click there it is. A tonsil close-up of some bedraggled woman in a cheesy motel room. Whoops! Too late. Your son, mother and wife witness the bottom of the porn barrel. There is no control. The family filter is a joke. Thats right. You have no control options. Veetle provides no self-regulating; no intention of self-regulating and the crap will continue. No, I am not a prude but please make my porn private.”
All I can add is according to Veetle website application available on ipod and ipad. What kid would be without their ipod? Yea, Veetle in the hands of minors is a problem for concerned parents.
van de la o cho ban muon gi !va nguoi ta co lam ban hai long khong?ban co lam dieu gi tot dep khien nguoi khac phai cam on chua!!
Peer-to-Peer Porn Via Damster-Dam. Until a week ago, Veetle had been a mix of ranchy porn for the realllly kinky and a fine assortment of films from the not too distant past. Even though it was absolutly worthless, the family filter has been removed. Curiously, the ‘Mature’ link is missing and a noticible lack of ‘Latest Movies”- me thinks pirated- are being broadcasted. These signs could mean a signal that Veetle plans to set up it’s porn entity on a separate site and allow us to go to the movies on our terms not the pornographers. We will see.
مرحبا
“Veetle appears from my vantage point to be a peer-to-peer video distribution system that most closely parallels the current cable TV model except applied to the Internet.”
actually Your wrong,it is NOT a P2p service in any form, veetle IS a generic antiquated Client/Server model were an end user broadcaster uploads at up-to their Max ISP given upload rate to the veetle servers and that relays the channel information data to the browser plug-in that is all…..
the key part here , i wont call it innovative as its not, is the fact that veetle executive took the trouble to use existing generic VLC (Video LAN http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ )code and browser plug-in re-brand/re-wrap it into the basic client/server web server relay model with html GUI front end, and actually put it up on the web-side Co-Location Site for free access to all end users to make use of and that is a very good thing.
you can stream anything you have available within 30 seconds of wanting to, even from a 3G web connected laptop web-cam or HD cam with 52Kbit/s upload rate or better. at a very good visual quality BECAUSE veetle also encourage end user broadcasters to use the free x264 AVC/H.264 encoder included inside the VLC browser wrapper or an external app if you prefer, not crappy and massive bandwidth taking antiquated CODEC alternatives, that’s why you can see and stream Your Own High visual quality HD video’s as you please IF you have enough upload bandwidth available to your use (1Mbit/s + upload rate and AVC x264 gives really good results if you feed it a good quality input ,end of story)
now veetle actually running as this client/server model could be a very good thing IF THEY Actually did it write and actually innovated this antiquated model as could others…. veetle need to patch and submit back to the VLC codebase Multicast tunnelling code and allow related SAP (Session Announcement Protocol) control to flow over these veetle supplied multicast tunnels end points to and from any end users running the app and interacting with a future veetle multicast tunnel API.
everyone win’s if they make this part simple and automatic , the worlds ISP’s refuse to allow web side multicast to all, so tunnel your single veetle multicast content over veetle tunnels and the bandwidth savings are MASSIVE for all involved…. throw in a real feedback comment channel with advanced options, that doesn’t disappear when the video channel goes down to refresh and take you annoyingly back to the front page, and write code patchs to display video meta data and overlay real-time text and adding to the schedule without the need to restart and your on a winner if you don’t piss your end users off to much by killing their streams without warning etc, and get some veetle employees in the actual channels helping and informing users to stop using crap quality files as their input, my pet hate given you are transcoding to the highest quality AVC for a given low bitrate so feed it some quality input to start with and keep that quality…..
Just like justintv I think people should make a profit as should a site like veetle.
But if you want to be TV cable or Sat. then I simplywould go back there, same with NetFlix, when you add up the costs it amounts to gouging. The trademark of all businesses now. I’m watching you at this time because justin is filling the screen with annoying ads and the crappy crawls.
Again I think a site should make a profit but does it have to be billions? Does it have to be done with IN YOUR FACE crap on the screen or can it be more subtle?
There is brains enough in America to figure these things out without the underlying greed sneaked into the mix.
Keep up the good work, I’ve watched these things come and go and the reason they go is the internet is NOT TV.
Support internet neutrality.
Regards
Bill Dunlap
Took a look at the site today and it doesn’t look like there are porn videos. Checked out the forums on the site and people were talking about the lack of porn videos.
You are right. Porn is gone for now. Veetle cleaned up its site of porn after many complaints. I also read the counter protest from porn broadcasters.They are foaming at the bit to broadcast this and not at all entertaining. The usual reaction upon viewing was, WTF is that s*** ! But if thats your bag there is plenty of it elsewhere…maybe not as raunchy.
http://www.pornhub4u.com is the best web site ever!
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Happy to see Veetle changed its offerings. I left it because of the porn and lack of family filter. Ever since it touted the availability on ipod and ipad it seems to have begun some self regulation.
@constantmovie, Save the praise for Veetle. They still do a lously job of moderating the broadcasters who try to rope a viewer in by using pornographic thumbnails. If Veetle chooses to ignore this it will be bye-bye sponsors.
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Nice stuff – straight to my bookmarks. I will come back again soon to read some more.