

Details Unveiled for Twitter’s Native Video Player to Rival YouTube - forlorn
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/02/details-unveiled-for-twitters-native-video-player-to-rival-youtube/

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msoad
It's interesting how Facebook closes it's eyes on copyright infringements
because they want to take over video consumption market. For example super
highlights[1] Facebook page share copyrighted football games all the time.
This is on top of giving video posts a higher rank and auto-playing the
videos.

Twitter will push a lot of videos using all sort of technics just like
Facebook.

To be fair, a playing video in my Facebook feed is very mesmerizing.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/pages/Super-
Highlights/358037564248...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Super-
Highlights/358037564248067?ref=br_tf)

~~~
forrestthewoods
The process is always the same

1\. Launch platform that supports user generated content 2\. Close eyes, let
any content go 3\. Manually take down selective content (porn, racist
material, etc) 4\. Support official DMCA channels 5\. Increase speed and
volume of take downs for select material 6\. Provide automatic detection and
takedown of MPAA/RIAA material

You only have to fulfill the requirement of each sequential bullet point after
you get substantially large. If you stay small and unprofitable you don't have
to worry about it. The more profitable become the more you have to worry about
it.

Honestly that seems pretty reasonable to me. Some cases, such as sports
highlights, are annoying. But for the most part it's fine. No, you can't make
millions of dollars off of someone else's content. I'm ok with that. YouTube
feels like it's in a pretty good spot imo. If someone wants to compete with
YouTube then they're gonna have to play by the same rules. That's not too bad.

~~~
rdl
Makes sense for a startup, but if you are part of an existing large company, I
don't see why rights holders wouldn't jump ahead to taking action even in
stage 1 and 2.

~~~
nl
They try, but the DMCA safe harbor provisions make it hard.

There is a doctrine of secondary infringement which arose out of the Grokster
case[1] that may help rights holders. However, it is pretty limited in scope.

[1]
[http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/report...](http://www.law.columbia.edu/law_school/communications/reports/winter06/facforum1)

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KaoruAoiShiho
For a second I thought it said Twitch.tv. Twitch has found a profitable niche
from which to attack youtube. Don't stop at video games, go for the jugular
twitch... Become youtube before youtube can become you.

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nicolasmiller
"Everything that happens in the world happens on Twitter..."

Really?

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kalleboo
"happens on Twitter" is obviously marketing but "gets mentioned on Twitter"
isn't far from the truth

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caseyf7
Well this will be a much better platform for response videos. We'll see if the
advertisers like it and the smart ones will expect it and take advantage of
it.

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0x0
Wasn't part of youtube's original concept to be limited to 10 minutes as well?
It's already been so long I've forgotten.

~~~
baddox
I thought that was just a technical limitation to prevent abuse of resources,
rather than a deliberate part of the concept of YouTube.

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sheensleeves
This reminds me of how CDROMs for PCs were hyped. The PC was then called a
"multimedia" PC. It made me sit down and have a think on what a PC is good
for. Playing video is one of those things.

So what we have at this point is former startups are playing slow follow
trying to dislodge best breed products. I won't name names, but I'm sure you
can think of other examples.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
An alternative to YouTube would be a healthy thing for the Internet. It has a
complete monopoly on online video, and its policies are awful for content
creators.

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lmm
A lot of slacktivists complain about their policies, but honestly, are they
that bad? I've heard a few content creators moan, but they've always stopped
well short of e.g. hosting their own videos.

If you're sailing close to the wind - making video collages with copyrighted
content (legal fair use, but that's an affirmative defence you have to assert,
not a right as such), or advocating for controversial political causes, or
doing things many people don't want to see in public (breastfeeding, nonnude
fetish modelling) - then sure, you're in trouble. But what proportion of
content creators is that? The mainstream of content creators are, I think,
doing fine under YouTube.

There are plenty of occasions where YouTube takes down things that are
perfectly legal, perhaps even things that don't violate their own written
policy. And sure, that's bad. But nothing they've done so far has felt like
the hill I would want to die on.

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higherpurpose
The good news: Youtube will have another main competitor, which can only be a
good thing.

The bad news: Twitter will start building its own "advanced censorship
infrastructure" to appease MPAA (just like Google did), which will later be
used for other kinds of censorship, too (shared images, tweets, etc).

~~~
lucaspiller
Not sure why this is being down voted, but it seems pretty fair to me. DRM is
the reason why YouTube still uses Flash as the main player, the same for
Netflix with Silverlight.

Given Twitter will mainly be doing this from a commercial angle, I can't see
them being any different - if anything their technical might will lead to
stronger DRM technologies.

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rtpg
DRM is not the reason youtube uses flash, browser support and feature usage.
HTML5 video APIs are still frustrating to use compared to flash's pretty well
built-out mechanisms.

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eleusive
Advertisers also love to serve video ads on a flash platform because it lets
them perform custom analytics, logic, etc.

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psykovsky
And don't forget the part where flash is a backdoor to users computers. It can
bypass proxies and give them your real IP, and I'm not sure even google will
want that to go away.

