Thread: Xvid or Veoh?
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Old 2007-12-01, 13:10   Link #8
Doughnuts
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: England
Age: 37
Streaming is extremely difficult to monetize. People can redisrubte your content, the worst case being them making money from ads at the cost of your bandwidth. People block ads and continually redownload content in the case of rewatching (because thier browser won't cache streams or whatnot). Streaming sites are either making very little money on ads, or are making a loss, waiting on future potential.

Veoh aren't making any much at the moment from their ads, that's why they're continually making cuts on video quality. A while ago they offered the ability to download full videos via their client, now I'm led to believe they've even cut down those downloadable videos down. They offered a DDL link on the webpage for a limited time, but realised that it isn't in their interest to do so. What's more is they have an ad deal with google, it's never going to be able to compete with youtube doing that. I see them making more and more cuts until it becomes no different to any other streaming site.

That being said, at the moment, Veoh is a decent alternative to distributing, it definately shouldn't replace BT. Veoh is especially useful for those ISPs and academic campuses that shape P2P traffic, as their client uses a completely HTTP based protocol for downloading and will go straight through most traffic shapers. Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to use BT. I was stuck with Veoh (and DDL sites) a few months ago in my student accomodation, I would've appreciated everything being uploaded there.

I don't see fansub groups ever moving to streaming. It'll never be as efficient as distibuting content, and it really isn't neccesary. Streaming is for the purpose of watching while it's downloading. Are you really that desperate to watch an episode of anime that you can't wait 20 minutes longer for it to download, and be in a watchable quality? I doubt fansub groups think so. Ads, previews, news etc I like to watch right away, but I usually download anime and leave it till I'm in bed to watch.

Even outside of fansubbing, I don't think the scenario will be much different. As TV moves to the net, it'll be likely to adopt the BT protocol, Veoh's web TV client won't be successful because it's horrible. They've reinvented the wheel instead of adopting a well designed and programmed protocol like BT, and done it badly. The idea behind their "peer casting" can be applied to Bittorrent by saying if(seeds=0) reseed(); Veoh waste so much bandwidth by letting you download from their cache servers when there are still seeds in the swarm. Legitimate producers will always opt for the cheapest distribution model.
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