The Business of Video Hosting

Bobcat here. Welp, looks like we got axed. Blip.tv sent us a lovely little e-mail message today informing us that after two and a half years of membership, they’re terminating our account. This is a shame, as we were actually fairly close to actually getting an ad payout for the first time ever, but whatever. My understanding is that they’ve been bought out by someone and they really wanted to weed out the small fry, and we’ve definitely always been small fry.

What does this mean for the viewers? Surprisingly little, and it may actually make life better. You see, this wasn’t Blip’s first brush with being uncool. While we were on hiatus, they stopped uploading videos automatically to iTunes and shut down our access to the RSS feed while I wasn’t paying attention, which means that the 51 episodes out there are pretty much orphans with no way to touch them. Now this lights a fire under me to get a new iTunes Podcast page set up since, unless I miss my guess, when the blip Five Point Podcast page goes dark on September 1st, the now locked down RSS feed vanishes too. I’d already been in the process of uploading all of our old videos to YouTube and now Dailymotion.

Why does this make life better? Because in my experience, Blip has been consistently bad at being available on mobile platforms- I’ve had several smartphones and I’ve never been able to view Blip vids on any of them. I’d even been considering having the ad-free YouTube vids underneath the Blip vids on the new website just to give poor mobile viewers a chance. Now, however, I have no excuse to keep using Blip, so now you’ll see Dailymotion vids on our website.

The one really annoying thing is that we had formerly distributed our wares far and wide on pages like That Guy with the Glasses and other sites for aspiring reviewers. I’m going to have to track down those episodes and update them with whatever we upload. Joy of joys; it’s been slow going getting this site up and running and resetting the YouTube page as it was.

Ah well. Onward we go, for the snark must flow.

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