On Monday, hipster cool video sharing site Vimeo issued a statement regarding their new policy towards video game related uploads. You can read their announcement on their blog and, if you’re man enough, you can then plow through the 750+ comments from their community members. The gist of the new policy is that any content related to video games will automatically be deleted from the site. This includes all previously uploaded video game movies as well.

Their reasoning for this decision is two-fold. One of their points of reason is that these particular types of videos are resource hogs. Since the number of video game movie uploaders is such a small percentage of their userbase, but taking up the majority of the resources, I can understand their decision to no longer allow that kind of content.

If they had just left it at that I don’t think this whole issue would have blown up into the debacle it has become. But things get a bit messy with their other line of reasoning for the new policy. Here it is straight from one of their staff members:

Vimeo was created with the intent of inspiring creativity and providing a place to share video with friends and family. The Vimeo staff does not feel that videos which are direct captures of video game play truly constitute “creative expression”. Further, such videos may expose Vimeo to liability from the game creator(s), as we have already seen action from popular video game companies against videos such as these.

Yikes. So the staff at Vimeo is now dictating what is and isn’t “creative expression” now? That’s a pretty thin layer of ice these guys are skating on with that statement. It’s especially ridiculous when there are quite a few videos on Vimeo that many could argue don’t constitute creative expression. This high-brow stance is kind of off-putting to someone like myself who isn’t a registered Vimeo user but is a big fan of the site and the people who run it.

If you decide to read some of the comments (I stopped after I got into the 600s) you can see Vimeo’s attitude on this really shine through. Some of their remarks are a little discouraging towards their users (most of whom are video game movie uploaders that will be leaving now with this policy change). There’s also a some double talk throughout regarding their fears of legal recourse for allowing game footage on their site. They say they aren’t concerned but it’s mentioned specifically in the quote I used above.

Like I said, I’m a big fan of Vimeo and the people behind-the-scenes but I’m pretty sure this could have been handled a lot better than it was. Hopefully they’ve learned a lot from this experience. I’m 100% positive they feel they’ve done the right thing (and they probably have) but their methods leave a lot to be desired.

It took a long, long time but YouTube finally announced additions to their API that actually make it useful. With the release of the features listed below we’re about to see the floodgate open on third-party YouTube applications.

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

I hope someone combines this with the new iPhone SDK and makes a YouTube application for my iPod Touch that’s actually worth a damn.

It’s worth taking 45 minutes to watch this video of the guys from skinnyCorp giving a great presentation on the success of Threadless. It will probably be the most useful for people who run community driven sites, but there’s good advice in here for everyone.

One of my baseball clients, the Everett AquaSox, are using the power of YouTube to bring video to their site. A recent news post about the team’s new advertising campaign starring former player Jay Buhner includes a clip of their new TV commercial embedded right into the post using YouTube.

This use of third-party tools not only saved them money but it also saved us all the time of going through video conversion which I can tell you from experience is a hassle.

We went live with our embedded Flash video yesterday on mudhens.com after some trials and tribulations. It turns out that my recommendation to use FFMPEGX for all your file converting needs wasn’t the best suggestion. We had a ton of framerate issues when trying to convert from MOV to FLV with FFMPEGX so we ended up finding something else.

Our final choice was a program called VisualHub. It chewed right through the MOV file that FFMPEGX couldn’t handle. The trial version of VisualHub will only convert up to two minutes of video but the registered version only runs $23.32 USD so it’s worth the price and then some.