10 Reasons Why Blip.tv is Better Than Youtube for Uploading & Sharing Videos on the Web
The brand YouTube may be synonymous with uploading and sharing of Internet videos but there's another video sharing service called blip.tv offering features that you can only dream of in Youtube or even Google Videos.Here we look at some of the unique features of blip.tv that makes it a much better destination for your videos than Youtube.
Support for video formats
Youtube lets you upload videos only in standard formats like the Windows AVI, MOV or the MPEG format. Blip.tv practically supports all possible video formats including the popular Flash Video (flv) format which offers better compression while maintaining the video quality.
Limitations on Video File Sizes
Youtube imposes a 10 minute or 100 MB restriction on files sizes but blip.tv has no such limitation. It is suggested that you can large AVI or MOV videos to FLV files locally and then upload them to blip.tv because FLV files are small in size and will upload very quickly.
Video Playback Options
Videos uploaded on Youtube are first converted to Flash Video and visitors can playback stuff only inside the Youtube branded Flash player. Blip.tv provides a host of options here - visitors can either watch videos in the default flash format or even in the original format that was used at the time of uploading the video.
Automatic Video Backup
What happens when you upload all your important videos to Youtube and the site breaks down for few hours because of a network outage ? Your video will remain inaccessible during that time but blip.tv has this useful option where your videos are parallelly uploaded to the Web Archives as well. So your videos are backed up without you having to do anything.
Video Thumbnail Image
A proper video thumbnail image is very important for grabbing the immediate attention of the visitor - looking at the content and quality of that tiny image, most visitors to video sharing sites decided whether they should watch the video or not ?
Youtube doesn't allow custom thumbnails and makes one automatically from the center frame of your video which may or may not be a good choice. Blip.tv lets you upload thumbnail images so that your videos look good even in the search results. Very cool.
Video Download Options
Youtube hates when people download videos from their site. Infact, they even sent Cease & Desist notice to TechCrunch for writing about a tool that makes it easy to download stuff from YouTube.
Blip.tv, on the other hand, make it very easy to download video. They also allow you download videos in the original format with the same quality - just right click the video link and choose save as. No confusing bookmarklets are required.
Detailed Site Statistics
Youtube shows content owners very minimal stats about their videos like what's the current rating, how many times the videos was played and which sites are linking or sending viewers to that video. Blip.tv provides detailed stats about your videos including how visitors found your video, what format they preferred and where did they watch it - in the feed, some blog or on the main blip.tv website.
Viewer Comments
Both Blip.tv and Youtube allow visitor comments but in Youtube one has to register before leaving a comment. How many times do you comment on a blog that requires registration ? Very rare. Same holds true here as well. The feedback is sort of limited with Youtube, blip.tv has word CAPTCHA to block spambots.
Video Descriptions
Video descriptions on Youtube are fairly limited to plain text and URLs but blip.tv supports rich text formatting for video descriptions like any other blog post. They provide a web based text editor like Wordpress and you can also put pictures in them. Again, this is essential to get visitor attention or to achieve good rankings in the search engines.
Video Quality
The most important part - Videos uploaded on Youtube are automatically compressed and resized to the 320x240 format. Blip.tv maintains the original quality of the video and they do not resize the video clips. They encourage content owners to upload different formats of the same video suitable for downloading, watching on the internet or on cellphones.
Conclusion: Blip.tv may not have the huge infrastructure as Google but for the content owner and the end user, that should not be a concern. And as their policy says - "you will always remain the owner of your content."
Blip.tv generates automatic feed enclosures for you RSS feeds. And wait, did we tell you that you upload videos to blip.tv via FTP. Go, give it a shot. You can even make dollars out of your videos.
Here's a sample video on Blip.tv starring my son. It may be tough to see this video quality on Youtube.
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Reader Comments:
Wow...great writeup. Is Yahoo going to do something about this company then? lol
Another nice informative post!
The quality of the video is great!!
eXcellent new site.
But their ad scheme sounds a bit scary - having a video add inserted in the middle ! As it is the downstream rate is low, inspite of having a 256kbps connection. Now I got to wait for the ads to load ! Yes, we can make money, but people would want to view the entire video as it is. Speech recognition algo to display ads ! Sounds real good, but how many advertisers are going to invest when they know this algo has not really been a success so far ?
I think this will truly work if you got atleast 1mbps.
I just uploaded an avi file and it shows using Media Player plugin. Its going to be difficult to get users to start adding various other plugins to view in other formats. It would be simpler if Flash does all the work.
And Im still waiting for the video to start showing.
No size-limit and high-res quality ! - Now thats a start for YouTube to compete.
blip.tv does not support rm format
youtube does.
Amit, How is divx stage 6.. I had a look at that site couple of months back and the audio/video quality was pretty high
On the downside, I guess they allow only uploading divx videos !
Great work. Thanks for the info.
Any Idea how they program for it? I was working on it with ffmpeg modules. I will write about it once we are done with it.
The video quality is superb. I grow tired of YouTube's high compression that ruins most of the videos they have. More competition the better.
Great story and video!
The info is outstanding....
Amit,
I dont think its easy for any other company to take aways youtube's popularity.Ofcourse,those who are techy would go for other sites but alot of youtube users are not too tech savy to say the least.
Thanks for this information Well now I can share my videos from my cellphone. It is hard for me to that here in Saudi since You tube is ban. At least for now Blip is not yet ban.. Thanks again
I agree with the others. The video quality is great but one downfall is that blip.tv doesn't support rm format while YouTube does. And still, YouTube has a much superior audience - will be hard to be outdone.
Ash Gilpin
http://www.ashgilpin.com
Who uses Real Media (.rm) files anymore? Seriously, I thought they were dead and burried by now. Anyone creating original content today would not use .rm as a file format. Makes no sense.
ash: larger doesn't mean superior
Hi! I've been able to upload FLV files to YouTube.
Just the same, thank you for this post. I'll go try Blip.tv soon.
Thank u for sharing one of the top vidoe sharing sites, blip.tv
10 features.
I will go n study them, and come back post more comment.
Happy Holidays
ummm blip requires you to be loged in to post a comment.. so .. ummm .. you lied .. or just perhaps they changed it ..
pick one..
a couple of things.
-blip.tv does support .rm. there is a bug (soon to be fixed) that results in a warning saying that .rm is not supported, but it can still be uploaded. virutally nobody uses .rm anymore so i had not heard of the bug until i read this!
-try talking to your provider regarding bandwidth issues. blip.tv has plenty of bandwidth and has no knowledge of speed problems. please feel free to email me with info (region, provider, time of day problem occurred) about your speed problems (eric/++@++/blip.tv).
-our ads are opt-in. you don't have to use them unless you want to. and they do nto increase load time. nothing scary here! :)
again, please feel free to email me with any questions regarding blip.tv
_
Eric Mortensen
eric/++@++/blip.tv
Director of Content Development
blip.tv
Blip.tv is hands down the best service out there. Great write up.
I use Real Producer to compress the AVI files my movie camera makes. The result is an RM file that is easy to email and upload to sites. Basic Real Producer is the only video program I've been able to find out there compatible with Mac OS 9.0. If there's something better for an ancient Mac OS like what I use, I'd love to try it.
Hi Amit,
you should give KONKAN TV, a try. Though not a service thats started with the same amount of capital as blip or the others, I would welcome your opinions on it...
I've just started using blip.tv a bit and I'm pretty happy with it. I hope they stick around and provide some quality competition for YouTube. Nice review here. What is the song playing on your video...?
Uploading videos to sites such as Youtube and Google certainly seems the standard way of doing things, of course there are plenty of other video sharing sites such as JumpCut and Bliptv but the question is, is it really worth it to design all sorts of pretty features into the uploading system, perhaps to a certain degree sure it may be a neat idea, but other than that there is such thing as " to much " for example video sharing sites such as Motiono allow you to upload videos with a flash based mechanism which makes uploading pretty quick and rather simple, but they do not have many features, it is this ability to be advanced yet useful and "just 1 flavor " .. sort of chocolate and vanilla ice cream without any additional flavors... what Google has right now is Vanilla only, what Jumpcut has is 10's of different flavors anything from Strawberry to Banana, but when it comes to being original Motiono has the perfect uploader tool in the video sharing industry ( my biased opinion ) it's just 2 of the most wanted flavors. Chocolate and Vanilla.
What seems really nice about blip.tv is they do not require you to sign off on a license giving them perpetual rights to use your content. This is reason enough alone for me to want to use blip.tv
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