Hi there!
I am not sure what is happening, but if I try to watch a video from the official Blender channel it says “This video contains content from BlenderFoundation. It is not available in your country”. It never happened before. There is a thread on reddit too about this so I am not the only one experiencing it. I am in the UK but the same problem is reported in US, Australia, Russia, Ukraine…
reddit thread, in case. https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/8rcv5h/blenders_official_youtube_channel_blocked_in_the/
Third party companies on youtube like to put false copyright restrictions even on bird vocalization. Enjoy your US copyright hell. Someone should be punished really hard for letting it happen.
Considering that the BF going dark impacts a number of other countries (including those with less strict copyright laws), the US Government can’t be faulted here.
I have been hearing about how videos are being taken down at a torrid pace in general (regardless of subject or genre). It has led to conspiracy theories of Google working to make YouTube into a subscription-based service (ie. behind a paywall) where only large creators with content deals survive.
Anyway, the current discussions suggest that even MIT (yes, the university) has been hit by the takedown wave. Google might be see a massive purge in their wallet if they manage to unite the entire human race against them.
And once again people used this to bring a tangential topic (something about EU bringing the most counter productive law related to the internet ever devised or something like that)
Still, it’s scary how a single mistake can make so much content unavailiable to the end user. Even what should be free content related to an open source project.
One of the issues is that Google is too reliant on their algorithms company-wide, as there are many people for instance who have said they’ve been kicked off of publishing on Google Play by a robot (followed by the inability to actually contact a human). It has the benefit of preventing the requirement of hundreds of moderators to stay on top of the vast torrent of uploaded content, but machines still struggle with a number of things people take for granted.
If their moderator algorithms have bugs like this, what’s going to happen when they flood the roads with their self-driving cars
The big tech. sites are starting to pick up the story of the YouTube copyright problems, and they think it has everything to do with the EU’s new proposed law.
That is the downside of running a truly global company, you might get very restricted if you follow the laws of all 200 nations at once. The alternative though isn’t that great either, which is much of the internet breaking into dozens of region-based walled gardens with their own services (we might still have the Blender project, but a worldwide community forum like BA will no longer be possible).
The benefit looks to be the ability to host a high-quality video playlist on your own site without a lot of effort (though it comes with the drawback of not being a part of a large video sharing community).
If they want to get their videos on a larger community though, there is supposedly an entire array of sharing sites out there now (which have gotten renewed attention since Google activated their moderation robot). YouTube is far from the only game in town now.
EDIT: It appears the BF’s channel was taken down at roughly the same time Google unveiled YouTube Premium (if the two things are related, it could spell trouble to non-profits and creators going forward, as anything with more potential controversy than dog and cat videos may be subject to being taken down).
Yay, trivially downloadable videos and no re-encoding / degradation of files.
Going by the pdf it looks like the goog / youtube wants to force ads upon popular channels.
On the one hand it’s like what happened to ‘don’t be evil’? On the other hand bandwidth and hosting is being paid for elsewhere so why not here too via ads? Could ad monetization add to the Blender Foundations coffers without risking the NFP status?
For years I have preferred content posted to vimeo, though I have not used it myself for hosting. For many years I have had better luck with their player than youtube’s.
I have tried youtube myself on the rare occasion every 3 or 4 years, but it has always been a garbage experience.
If I post a video properly labeled, tagged, relevant description, etc. the video never gets associated with videos related to the same subject. Right when I would post something the “Recommended” list would have some relevant videos, but given some amount of time, the entirety of the “Recommended” list would have absolutely nothing related to the video I posted. For example if I posted a Blender Cycles related video with matching tags, the entire recommended list would be a bunch of random garbage that had nothing to do with it.
Any more I just use it for unlisted videos for embedding elsewhere.
Random youtube bans/locks, de-listing, demonetization, almost never seems to happen to big media/big corporate accounts. I have no doubt there is a hidden “VIP” flag enabled for some accounts so things like demonetization bots, or DMCA takedowns will never cause a problem.
While the BF can monetize, there’s both the ideological issues (by putting in adverts they are forcing people to ‘pay time’ as opposed to donating) and more prudently, this stipulation is completely new to everyone but Youtube, so you’d have your content on a platform that is really amazingly bad at informing you about its ToS.
That motto was axed by Google a number of months back.
Also, what’s happening to YouTube is happening on other services like Google Play as well. I noticed on my Android tablet that the Top New Free and Top New Paid sections no longer exist (which thereby destroyed the ability to discover new stuff and drive people more towards apps. by large players or apps. with high revenue numbers). They later added a new apps. section, but it’s only for stuff that Google thought would be good to feature.
I really like the concept of PeerTube, but right now if I try to play “The Daily Dweebs” video on their test page I can’t get over 1Mb/s usage, and thus constant buffering, however the other videos seem to do a bit better. Name implies: maybe not enough peers yet? Maybe there will be a handler for youtube-dl eventually.
I do greatly prefer decentralized platforms and have a feeling they will become more mainstream as the control freak/censorship stuff increases.
Wait a minute or two and the video will load all the way (like YouTube used to do). I did watch the Dweebs for the first time and the quality was quite good (though less compression will always mean more loading time).
