Ultra Video Gallery Review Part 2
Posted by Jeff on Sunday, February 24, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN Module Reviews
This is part 2 of my Ultra Video Gallery review. If you missed part 1, you can catch up on it here. To recap, UVG is an extremely well written, intelligently crafted module suite for presenting video content within DotNetNuke. It offers nearly every online video feature seen on sites like YouTube and will help you quickly add an interactive, modern, social element to your DNN website with very little effort.
Ultra Video Gallery as a Business
If you haven’t included video content on your site, you are missing an element that has come to be expected by your visiting public. UVG offers an easy way for you to integrate a couple dozen or a couple thousand videos. The question that you’ll ultimately ask is “What videos should I include, and for what purpose?”
I’m sure many developers have had an initial “Hey, I can build my own YouTube now!” reaction to UVG. While that may be true, a site open to all categories of videos is almost sure to fail. YouTube is the 400 pound gorilla in the general video search game. You aren’t going to beat it head on. I think the real opportunity here is for DNN site owners to quickly and inexpensively craft a niche portal filled with multiple forms of multimedia devoted to a single, refined topic.
YouTube features a plethora of videos covering every topic imaginable. The problem is finding the best content on a specific subject. Yes, you can search and surf related videos. And yes, there are ratings that can help guide you. But, let’s get real … you will have to sift through a lot of garbage to uncover the diamonds.
If you wanted to try Catfish Noodling, you could certainly search YouTube and find some interesting videos. However, I contend that a website totally devoted to the art of grabbing fish with your bare hands offers a far more compelling visitor experience. You won’t get millions of hands typing in your website address, but you are likely to get thousands that will actually follow through and reach for a wallet. Now throw in a little quality control on the videos, editorial comments, additional text content, a community discussion forum, and targeted advertising. Then go find the next extremely tiny niche activity that captures your passion and repeat! The opportunities are endless.
The Legal Issues
Now that you’ve decide to craft the world’s foremost online community devoted to Pig Racing, it’s time to collect the best online video content in one place. Here’s where your ethics can get a little muddy.
You can easily search YouTube for a hundreds of videos in this niche. You’ll want to do some quality control and only pick the best of the best to feature on your site. With UVG, you don’t even have to upload these videos onto your own hosting account. You can simply enter the YouTube video URL and UVG will automatically play the video on your website just like the videos that you do own and host.
Wow … sounds great! I thought so too, at first. But when I dug a little deeper, I realized that UVG is pointing directly to the underlying Flash video file hosted on YouTube’s servers while completely bypassing the actual YouTube video player wrapper. That means none of YouTube’s advertising overlays will show up on these videos. Also, the all important YouTube “view count” won’t increase for videos played on your UVG site. If you choose to go this route, you are blatantly stealing bandwidth and ad revenue from YouTube. You are also doing quite a disservice to the folks who originally uploaded the videos.
Your niche site won’t require massive amounts of traffic to be successful, so I doubt YouTube would bother to take legal action. But, that doesn’t make it right. From a pragmatic point of view, it’s also just plain stupid. YouTube is more likely to find a way to encrypt direct access to its videos … thus, you’d be left with a worthless collection of nothing anyway.
The better approach is more time consuming, but in the end safer and more productive. Simply contact the video owners directly through YouTube’s “send message” feature. Explain the concept of your new site and ask if they would like to be featured. In most cases, not only will they be thrilled by the request, but they will likely begin to frequent your website, participate in forum discussions, and offer valuable articles and blog posts. Can you think of a better way to start a thriving, niche community?
Handling Video Hosting Costs
Once you have your videos and explicit permission, host them yourself. Wait, isn’t that going to cost a fortune? Isn’t that going to bring my web server to its knees?
Not if you use Amazon’s S3 file hosting service.
Amazon offers a pay-as-you-use hosting model built on the same scalable platform used to run its own mega-business. It is dirt cheap at pennies on the gigabyte and is already powering a wild new array of innovative online businesses, websites, and services. The good news? It’s simple to use and manage. Your grandmother could probably figure it out. The better news? I have it on good authority that a future release of Ultra Video Gallery will offer built in support for Amazon S3. Until then, you can manually point UVG to videos hosted on Amazon S3.
What are you waiting for? Get out there and start your online niche community today!
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