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The Media Youtube

Ask Slashdot: Options Beyond YouTube For An Indie Web Show? 60

Posted by timothy from the pirate-tv-from-your-house dept.
New submitter Deltree Zero writes: I have an indie TV-style education/entertainment show which focuses on medicinal cannabis growing and use in Maine, product reviews, guests, etc. I have been creating the show at home using a very passable camera, editing with Lightworks, and have been distributing it via YouTube. I am five monthly episodes in, and besides needing a small upgrade in the microphone department, production has settled in to a workable quality level that I can be proud of. I am not looking to collect money at any time during distribution. The show is getting quite popular and I was wondering if any Slashdot readers had any advice on how to distribute my show other ways than YouTube. I see Roku is an outlet like this but my show must first pass through some sort of content filter and I am still waiting to hear if medicinal cannabis is on the "no-no list." There are other indie TV-style channels I have heard of, Revision 3, for example. What other indie channels exist that might deliver my show at low or no cost? What other methods of digital distribution make sense for an upcoming web show looking to free itself from YouTube as its only distribution point?
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Ask Slashdot: Options Beyond YouTube For An Indie Web Show? More

Ask Slashdot: Options Beyond YouTube For An Indie Web Show?

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  • Try Vimeo [vimeo.com].

    • I will try Vimeo. Thank you. :)

  • " I am not looking to collect money at any time during distribution."

    Not when you can get kickbacks from the products and people you interview.

    • We do get free objects from time to time such as gear to review, but we only accept thing in this way and are not out for any profit. We feel education about what we do is important and if we can deliver that and be entertaining as well, awesome.
  • You say you are not looking to collect money at any point in distribution. So what do you want? Maybe you want a lot of people to see the show. In that case, Youtube already serves you well for distribution, and you could just focus on advertising/promotion. Or maybe you want clout. Or having colleagues and connections. Or something else?
    • We only want to take some of our free time and passion for what we do and turn it into an entertaining 15-30 min monthly video that can help educate people and be fun. The more people we reach in this way the better. There is nothing to advertize for or promote besides our views on medicinal cannabis. Clout is great. Colleagues and connections we already have, but more cannot hurt.

  • Depending on the quality of you show, your options could range widely from Vimeo/Twitch to iTunes/Amazon. Since your streams may be considered 'illegal' in some parts of the world, I recommend doing it yourself on a video streaming hosting, making available over BitTorrent and a darknet advertising the alternative options through your regular channels just in case you have to deal with a takedown.

    • I did not realize Twitch did things besides game streams, I will try Twitch. Thank you. :) iTunes? I suppose you are right. I did not think of that either, but that is probably because my opinion of Apple is poor. Good idea. Having our own website and things like that seem a bit more costly than we are prepared for. I am a geek with a nice PC and good software and a backgound in art and media so the show is of realtively high quality at little to no cost. As I mentioned we are not looking to make money to s

  • you could, gasp, pay for your own bandwidth.

  • You could host the multimedia files on your own website, which would let you move your domain and/or provider to an amenable ISP whenever needed while retaining the same URLs for your visitors. There are ISPs such as Dreamhost.com that will host email and websites and their accompanying data files at reasonable costs with lots of bandwidth should your show become popular. I don't work for them but I've worked with their hosting and found it to be reasonable.

    You could host files on archive.org [archive.org] (the Internet

    • You could consider delivering pointers to your shows delivered cooperatively via BitTorrent with magnet URLs posted to popular BitTorrent-based sharing sites so the public can keep your shows downloadable even if you find hosting hard to come by.

      This touches on an interesting idea which I wonder if anyone has built: a video distribution system built on BitTorrent. It seems like a clever way of using the network strength instead of these monolithic companies storing and sending all the data, requiring massive resources. It seems like it could work as long as you had enough nodes (especially offering the first few blocks - improve quick-start behaviour) and it would scale with popularity of the channel: a channel could just provide an RSS feed in

  • The population of Maine is 1.33 million.

    YouTube is the simplest and most reliable way of reaching your target audience and establishing the legitimacy of your project, assuming that the medical and not recreational uses of marijuana are your real concern.

    The geek will propose setting up a darknet, when the real need is for openness and exposure.

    • Thank you for the current state of Maine population update. Our goal is to make the show available to everyone worldwide. We happen to live in Maine, but our education does not focus on Maine law or only Maine medicinal cannabis. Recreational use is not a current issue we address on the show, but recreational use is already in effect in Portland Maine, and is expected to pass statewide very soon. Perhaps at that time we will go down that road. I am quite geeky but not enough to understand darknet biz, lea

  • I also try and avoid google products. I found that the transcoding works best on liveleak and dailymotion. The other free video hosting providers seem not to be able to handle 1080p very well...

  • Maybe Atheist TV? http://atheists.org/AtheistTV [atheists.org]

  • Everyone knows Youtube, it's free, it allows unlimited bandwidth (unlike Vimeo) if you get enough subscribers you can alter the channel design fairly significantly.

    Everything else I have tried sucks, or cost, or limits.

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