YouTube
was created in 2005, but much like Google, it feels like it’s been
around forever. We post our videos on YouTube, look for some silly
entertainment during boring afternoons and send videos along to friends
much like old ladies used to spread gossip around town not very long
ago.
But should you be limited to
YouTube?
Let’s be honest, there is a whole world of streaming video online that
most people have never seen because they have settled for YouTube. Most
sites have the same features, or features even better than YouTube has
and some have a more specialized selection or much higher quality
videos.
So here is a small sample of video sites you should check out that many people feel are better than YouTube.
Current TV is a website that is also a TV channel, but unlike all
other tv sites, that post their content from tv on their sites, Current
plays the content from their website on TV. People post their videos, or
pods, on the site which get voted by the community and the highest
ranking ones get on their television channel. Current has an enticing
variety of videos, but the heart of the site is its amazing independent
journalism. On Current, you can see all the reports that usually don’t
get on television, or a whole new approach to the news you do see. For
video producers, it’s a chance to get your video on tv and a little bit
of cash to go with it.
TED is unique in the world of streaming video, and it is brilliant in
its own way. TED’s whole concept is to spread ideas, and to accomplish
that, it has enlisted some of the most brilliant minds in the world to
create “talks” about topics as diverse as
Eve Ensler’s “Embrace your inner child”,
Murray Gell-Mann’s ”Beauty and truth in physics” or
Bill Gates’ “Mosquitos, malaria and education”.
Better than YouTube in another way, the search on the site also works
in an ingenious way, letting you search by keywords or by themes such
as: inspiring, beautiful or fascinating. For those of us who are eternal
students, TED is a jewel of endless facets.
Following a very similar style to TED, Big Think takes an interview
approach to its video instead of a prepared talk. The result is a very
interesting group of answers that make you feel like you actually got to
ask a famous expert the question yourself and he had the kindness to
reply. It’s not as evolved as TED is, but it is certainly biting at its
heels.
If you think YouTube videos are funny, you’ve never visited Atom,
previously Atom Films. With an enormous array of animations, comedy
shorts and sketches, Atom hasn’t lost its edge after its acquisition by
MTV. Because of its huge selection of talented filmmakers who normally
contribute to the site and with their own staff filmmakers, who were
selected from some of the funniest sites online, Atom manages to
consistently have shorts that will lighten up the most boring of days.
Created on May 11, 2005, the same year as YouTube, Blip.tv has
mimicked what network television channels offer but using the same
resource Current TV uses: independent producers. It currently has about
48,000 independently produced Web shows and approximately 22,000,000
viewers. They share the revenue of their ads with the producers, which
allows them to make some income from their shows and keep producing them
and in exchange, Blip.tv gets a constant supply of episodes for their
site. So what can you find on Blip.tv? Mostly, the site consists of
series of shows, much like television shows, with genres like dating,
technology, animation and a diverse group of fiction stories.
Did you ever want to know how to photograph a red squirrel, how to
reduce poverty in developing worlds or how to go geocaching with your
kids? Well, you can find all of those answers and much, much more on
5min.com, the site that will try to teach you how to do almost anything
in 5 minute videos.
WwiTV is more an aggregator than a video site, since it doesn’t store
the videos itself, but merely points at videos in other sites. The
reason it made this list is that it points at video channels from all
over the world, so if you’d like to watch a soap opera from Azerbaijan
or a music video from Vietnam, you can find it all on WwiTV. The quality
is generally quite poor and the site itself is quite an eye sore, but
where else would you find a North Korean video as top selection of the
day followed closely by the Hellenic channel in Greece?
Television channels seem to have noticed that trying to keep their
shows out of streaming video sites is a lost battle. Their response
seems to be finding partners who will help them deliver the content in
its entirety and in higher quality than the ripped versions of the
videos while sharing the ad revenue. One of such partner sites is
Hulu.
It carries content from many tv channels at very high streaming
quality. The one catch is that it doesn’t have international streaming
rights for their content outside the USA, so it’s for an American
audience only.
Since it was created by filmmakers, Vimeo shows a very holistic and welcoming approach to video sharing.
Vimeo
tends to attract more professional filmmakers than other sharing sites,
the video tends to be higher quality and the design certainly beats
YouTube’s messy look. The community projects and groups also make it
easy to find videos of a particular topic or subject matter and with
almost 3 million members and over 17000 videos uploaded daily, there is a
lot to choose from.
The proposal of sites like Stickam is very innovative. Let the
audience participate by streaming their own video live. For most part,
it works in an exciting way. Some shows are scheduled and you can stream
your own video as an audience member and talk to the hosts or video
chat among other viewers. It’s like being part of a live audience and
always carrying the mike. You can also watch pre-recorded shows and
interviews.
The one issue is that for a large part of the day, the site seems to
be inhabited by the people who are most at ease with webcams, young
teenagers. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if you are looking
for some more experienced discussions you must select your live streams
carefully.
The older, more mature version of Stickam, Ustream also allows people
to create their own broadcasting channels and their own live shows. It
does, though, carry live broadcasting from many mainstream media sites
and it doesn’t allow people to join in with their video chats the way
Stickam does, but it does have live text chat.
The topics tend to be more interesting than Stickam’s since it has a
lot of contributions from professional journalists who decided to try
the live interactive video format.
Why bother visiting a bunch of video sites looking for viral videos
when you can find it all on one site? Boasting to be world’s largest
video search engine with over 35 million hours of video from all major
video sites, Blinx even claims to have indexed more media searches than
Google. All you have to do is type in a keyword and you get results
from major sites all at once.
There are literally thousands of streaming video sites to choose
from, built just to entertain or inform you. Some are very niche, some
copies of what we’ve already seen. The ones above are a taste of those I
find myself checking out on a regular basis. What are your favorite
ones
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