LiveVideo vs. YouTube (2007)

Here is my own take on the subject as a whole. It's a bit fragmented due to the fact that it's more a synthesis of unfolding events rather than an analysis.

After a day's break from the Internet I finally logged into my YouTube account and checked the subscriptions. The first thing I noticed was a strange anomaly: at least one fifth of the videos had "LiveVideo" in their titles and in the next 24 hours every serious video blogger was to post at least one video about this novelty.

It's not clear who actually started the LiveVideo discussion but it exploded almost instantly, with PeriUrban and others sharing their views. A sea of responses followed, with Tom contributing probably the most thought-out of all responses, and then again replying to geriatric1927's (a very unusual thing for him to do) own response. From Pipistrello to Argent009, everyone had something to say about it.

LiveVideo

So, what else was I to do than check it out for myself? With mixed feelings and a suspicious look I took a look at LiveVideo.com, finding nothing less than a blatant copy of YouTube! I quickly registered a few usernames, liking the fact that it allowed me to register my own name (unlike YT)!

The site seemed very decent: with trendy dark colors, an almost Yahoo-like layout and almost all of YouTube's features, its design still seemed a bit rough and without the glorified minimalistic functionality, but still very cozy.

LiveVideo seems almost like it aims to be YouTube mixed with Stickam (and MySpace) without any of their problems. It seems to do that job extremely well, especially because it was made with all the different dimensions (and difficulties thereof) in mind that have opened up recently, while YouTube was simply adding layer upon layer until its foundations started to crumble beneath the unexpected (unpredicted) weight.

It still has its flaws, for example no QuickList feature (which is really annoying to me), its flash player almost kills off my 900MHz Celeron - which is a much greater performance hog than YouTube and probably makes the videos unplayable on mobile devices (which could prove to be a problem in the future), but for the most part it certainly is superior to its alternatives.

Out of Nowhere? Nope.

The most strange thing about LiveVideo is that it appeared out of the blue and even nalts didn't seem to notice it before the discussion about it gained momentum on YouTube.

Even LiveVideo itself seems to be wrapped into a veil of mystery, revealing very little information about itself: it has a company blog with a more personal approach to users, a notice that their copyright agent is located just south of L.A. international airport and that it's owned by LiveUniverse Inc. Hold on, LiveUniverse?

Let me explain. LiveUniverse Inc. is a company that owns about 20 web services, all of them focusing on social networking and online video communities (which have become traffic generators for LiveVideo, like this one and this one).

This is also the same company that created MySpace (with their chief executive Brad Greenspan) and as one comment at mashable.com pointed out, there is some smoke and mirrors with its success - they hired video bloggers during their start up to make the site appear more appealing and as mentioned before, they are artificially generating traffic with sites like their recently acquired flurl.com.

When you realize how powerful and ruthless this YouTube's new competitor really is, a whole new horizon of possibilities opens: I'm beginning to doubt that LiveVideo's emergence on YouTube really was a spontaneous event - probably not. But speculations about who in the YT community was paid to advertise LiveVideo to the side, it is quite obvious that its developers were paying close attention to the community, sculpting LiveVideo to fit their collective needs (Argent009 made a clever observation that it seemed as if they'd be watching YT community and incorporating every feature they proposed to YouTube).

And last but not least, there is a strong Hollywood connection here.

Unfolding of Events

However, YouTube isn't a saint either: it quietly removed the LiveVideo-related videos (vlogs) from all most viewed/discussed lists, stripping them of all honors (how else could you explain that the most hot topic was nowhere to be found?) - and therefore acknowledged its awareness of the new competitor. Still, exercising such power heavily undermines YouTubes credibility and is most certainly not a good prospect for the future.

In any case, the YouTube community of content creators and especially video bloggers finally seems to be "growing up" (as in getting more experienced), hopefully realizing that YouTube is just one of many similar services. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean a detachment from the YT community but rather decentralization, dispersion of content to multiple sites - which means that we can expect some more upload bandwidth consumption and a few new services that deal with distribution of your newly created video to a number of sites.

What surprised me the most with all the talk about LiveVideo is that those who decided to "migrate" mostly kept giving the impression that YT community is a single entity but only considered their "friends" to be a part of it - unlike those with a more neutral approach who emphasized their power of individual choice.

One question certainly remains unanswered: Is this power of collective choice like a swarm of hungry grasshoppers, moving from one meadow to another (and back again)? I hope not.

And as for YouTube itself... it certainly is a late wake-up call, a healthy slap in the face just before you moonwalk over a cliff. They had months (which is years in Internet time!) to deal with complaints or at least change their please-hold-on attitude; a reactionary blog entry is simply too little too late.