Fried from a long day, then with a client until 11:00, much-needed couch time. Overwhelmed myself with Olympic opening ceremony last night, couldn’t take more. Then remembered – wasn’t Tivo about to grow a YouTube gland? Checked in and sure enough, a bazillion new vids were there, waiting to be inhaled.
As expected, video quality isn’t great blown up to HDTV size, and audio is sometimes out of sync with the video, but the range of human experience at your fingertips is mind blowing. Started with a few Captain Beefheart clips, moved on to Django Rheinhardt, then to Jacob Kaplan-Moss talking about Django at Google HQ in 2006. I’d never watch an hour-long video at the computer, too restless for that, but this works.
The long tail is in my living room.
P.S. Thanks to the WordPress dev team for creating the WP posting client for iPhone, which I’m tapping away at now – wallowing in luxuriant tech.
“The ink is never dry on these babies.”
Hmm… I forgot about that. I’ve been using the Wii to watch YouTube in the living room.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNVYWJOEy9A
Miles loved that :)
(and so did I)
Glad you’re enjoying the new YouTube feature, Scot — let me know if you see any issues or would wish for any enhancements. We are at work on version 2 (we’ve already mentioned that the ability to login and have access to your favorites is forthcoming).
Ah, that’s right – forgot we had a Tivo insider in da house :)
Props to your team for making this happen – nice job. My wishlist for it:
– Top-level menu access w/o drilling down
– Snappier response time
– Consistency (start with a search result and you’re looking at one set of results; then finish a video and find yourself looking at a different UI – apparently the “related videos” – would expect to be returned to the search results.
– Found one video that wouldn’t play for some reason. Not clear why, but Tivo insisted that my network connection was down every time I tried to access it. Network was fine and I could view everything else, so the error msg was misleading.
Rarely watch long videos on computer, but stumbled onto the Steve Jobs / Bill Gates D5 video and watched the entire thing, 1hr 29min 33 sec laying flat on my back with my MacBook Pro inside iTunes. That much more enjoyable to watch using Apple”s stuff.
What is “long tail” reference? I’m ignorant.
Jeb, the “Long Tail” is “everything else” — the enormous part of the marketplace that doesn’t fit into your local bookstore, music store, video store. All of the back-catalog that almost no one ever buys, all of the rare/unpopular/obscure stuff. The giant submerged part of the iceberg that we never saw before the internet, because it couldn’t fit into stores. When dealing with bits rather than atoms, it’s nearly as cheap for a retailer or a marketplace to traffic in everything ever made (iTunes, eMusic, YouTube) as it is to sell a limited subset of the popular stuff (like your local video store).