Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben
When Brad started this site, the quality of Youtube videos was abysmal, and he wanted a place to share Alizée clips streaming in high quality. Keeping those running is what makes our costs so high, but Youtube's quality now meets or exceeds them, so I may look into more cost-effective ways to run the server in the future.
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Of course YouTube still imposes a ten-minute limit on clips, but one can always catenate a set of them via a playlist. I remember when Americans had nothing but ad-interrupted TV, and it didn't kill us. (Dana Carvey's SNL Old Codger says "And we liked it!") A burp between clips every ten minutes would be even less painful.
Support of playlists also let folks cue up a set of videos for a party, etc. Another benefit of using YouTube videos is that it is easy to embed them into Web pages, and well-known means exist to start a clip at an arbitrary point, helping one to illustrate some aspect of the clip. Add-on text-based captioning is supported, allowing one to turn such captions on or off. You can also employ annotations, so you can point at the dancer who falls down in
Adelaide, etc. But be aware that any proprietary content may be flagged by the sophisticated "fingerprinting" system Google now uses to keep copyright holders happy.
Thus, migrating videos to YouTube not only would save money, but add functionality. If most of the $2,000 per year comes about from streaming video, perhaps one might compute the cost saving of moving the videos so many months earlier than scheduled, and outsource the migration for pay.