Monday, October 25, 2010

Web videos tend to expire

For a year starting in March 2009, I ran an experiment in video aggregation called One Stop Video.
I posted videos to the site from many sources – YouTube, Vimeo, NBC.com, Onion News Network, CollegeHumor, Funny or Die and others.
A good number of those embedded videos no longer work.
For instance, of the 64 videos I embedded on One Stop Video in January through March this year, seven of them no longer work. That’s 11% dead links.
I’m certain that the dead video ratio is just as bad for last year.
The reasons for the dead links include content owners pulling videos from their own sites and enforcing copyright restrictions on other video posters. (See screenshots above and below.)
That’s one of the big reasons that I decided to pull the plug on One Stop Video. There was no sense posting interesting and funny videos if they weren’t going to last.
Seven months later, I’ve decided to post videos to One Stop Video again. I’m doing this mostly as a way to compile my favorite comedy videos in one place. It sure beats bookmarks.
I had thought that I’d do this here on Tech-media-tainment, but it just wasn’t a good fit.
So check out this first bunch of videos from the Onion News Network on One Stop Video.
The Onion, which posts consistently funny content, hasn’t let its online videos expire like NBC.com and others.

No comments: