Let's Look at Blip.tv

Blip.tv is a web service which allows users to upload videos to create a video-blog known as a channel. It bears similarities to other popular services such as YouTube but boasts a few special features to make it stand out. Below is an overview of Blip.tv’s site functionality and compatibility with other web services.

To help better display the flow of a typical user; a simpler diagram has been provided below. It diagrams a sample situation involving signing up to Blip.tv to upload a video to then display on their Blogger page. There are other routes that could occur in this process which are coloured in gray. I will compare below the diagram the same method accomplished (or not) on YouTube and compare the services and reasons.

For this example: I have a video, on my hard drive. I want to have it on my Blogger blog.

A problem with creating a user on Blip.tv is that you must also create a channel with every user. This channel works like a video blog, with option for a written blog and each video as the next ‘episode’ in your ‘channel’. This is great if you want to create a video log, but is awkward if you only intend to upload a few standalone videos. Creating a channel when you create a user is unnecessary if you only intend to comment, etc. You cannot edit the name or address of the channel once you create it, so you must create a new user with a different email address if you want to start a new channel.

Starting a serious channel can be used to make profit on Blip.tv also. It is a requirement of sign up that all work you upload is original and you may assign creative commons licences so others may distribute your work. Advertisements are an option on Blip.tv and you may link Blip.tv to your PayPal account so for every advertisement shown or clicked you receive a portion of the revenue. Creating a highly popular channel could be profitable.

Despite a few good features there is not a lot of user interactivity on Blip.tv. Apart from comments on individual videos (you must go to the episode page as you cannot comment from the channel where you may watch from) there is no ‘friends/contacts’ or ‘favourites’ options for keeping track of other users on site as you would see on YouTube . You may (through an overly complicated process) create a playlist of videos you have watched, but it is awkward to set up and you must go to the episode page to add them and may only delete them from deep inside your user dashboard (the preferences page). Again YouTube handles this much easier, allowing you to add videos before you watch them to a ‘quicklist’ (you don’t even need to sign-in as it saves it to cookies).

An odd choice, Blip.tv only allows users to comment, but every comment demands an image-word verification that apparently only a human can complete. Creating a user however does not need this verification. YouTube does not require tedious verification for comments but asks once for verification upon sign-up. YouTube can also use your existing Google account as a log in, although it demands personal information such as location, DoB and gender. An improvement that would benefit Blip.tv is that instead of simply linking accounts for Blip.tv to Facebook and Flickr to allow the same account to access all three services. This however is impossible due to Flickr already being a part of the Yahoo network. However interestingly Blip.tv supports an option to send all uploaded videos to Yahoo Video among many other services shown in the diagram at the beginning of this document.

Comparing video uploading between the services Blip.tv and YouTube, both have interesting options. Blip.tv has options to upload video thumbnails (where YouTube pre-generates an image) and many methods of uploading video (such as from mobile, FTP or a desktop application called UpperBlip. Blip.tv offers a speedy upload that can take many formats, then after you have uploaded and are free to leave Blip.tv from your browser, the file is converted to flash for the player. YouTube offers multiple uploads at once, but it’s variety of formats is smaller (my .mov video I used to test Blip.tv failed when tried onYouTube and only ‘unknown’ reason was given).

There are a few ways of embedding video depending on your blog using Blip.tv. If your blog is supported, you may add uploaded videos to your blog feed, or for the case of Flickr, Facebook or Twitter; Blip.tv may automatically create a new post with the video/link/thumbnail. If you are not the owner of the video or only want a single video, you may embed the video into any posting service that supports HTML and embedding. You may also freely download any video on Blip.tv. YouTube however owns any video posted to their site and only offers embedding. There is never any watermarking on videos uploaded to Blip.tv.

To sum up: Blip.tv is a much younger service than YouTube. It isn't even out of beta stages yet. It has two apparent goals that separate it from YouTube. Firstly that it is a video blogging service targeted to an internet-mature community, secondly that all videos are owned by the user who uploaded them and is supportive of creative commons rights.

All logos are owned by their respective companies; all research is original.
Diagrams created by James Woldhuis.