Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/24/san-diego-comic-conhome-video.html
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I put all shame on Comic Con for running a shitty con on Youtube on the cheap. This was bound to happen. SFWA ran a virtual con using Zoom as their product of choice, and by every report it went incredibly smoothly and allowed for greater interaction by those watching the various panels than youtube can.
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My first thought: what possessed them to use YouTube?
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“CBS fAiL Access?”
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They probably saw it as the most accessible platform.
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I helped put on a fundraiser that was streamed to a large audience. This audience skews older, but is highly educated and engaged. In our early testing, a fair percentage of people couldn’t figure out how to download Zoom (or similar products), click through the link to be connected to a stream in one of those products. This was on the 4th of July, so you’d think people would have had plenty of time to get used to Pandemic Chat.
The cost of streaming to big groups over products like Zoom or Bluejeans would have been pretty high. We ended up streaming via YouTube Live. It maximized the accessibility (a single link to click, no software to install), and it cost nothing. I mean, we paid for StreamYard which is an awesome product, but that cost three orders of magnitude less than some of the other end-to-end streaming products would have. We also were not doing the full interactive thing because of fear of troll attacks, so that did make a difference in our choices.
The downsides were that we couldn’t use prerecoded music that YouTube’s algos would flag as a copyright violation. Weirdly, YouTube makes it really hard to show that you’re licensed for a bit of media.
I also worried about artists performing their own work live. I don’t know how sloppy the matching algorithm is, nor what’s “too close” to a recording. Fortunately, we didn’t get snagged on this. Especially since I didn’t have a backup plan 
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Exactly this. There are a lot of technogeeks and nerds on the BBS who forget that not every comic-fan is “your” comic fan. Youtube is “just there” for folks while installing additional software or providing additional instructions will almost certainly limit (or at least frustrate) some of your viewers.
This monopoly is, of course, part of why Youtube has a de facto monopoly on video streaming in the first place.
One can only hope that issues like this cause the corporations that help enable this situation to re-evaluate their allegiances.
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YouTube is not a platform for creativity or socializing.
No one should be using YouTube to publish their own creations, or to review other works under fair use. It’s an advertising platform of a billion eyeballs and nothing more. Anything that impedes advertisement, like powerful copyright holders, will be crushed. And revenue will be redirected on the whim of YouTube.
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Odd as it is to use, I’d actually use Steam’s ability to stream anything real-time (with a 15-20 sec delay) smoothly; there’s no content checks at all, just your system’s feed, and Steam membership is only required for making comments in the channel’s chat.
Notably, you can set any specific app, Steam or non-Steam, as the trigger to keep the channel open, if you’d like to close the Steam interface; I use Wordpad. So far, I’ve had no problems sending all desktop content, including DRM’d streams such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Tidal Music. While Steam-native apps stream with little noticeable delay, there’s a 15-20 sec delay when general broadcast is used, but it’s smooth 1080p with full audio =).
Funny enough, I spent a large portion of last night figuring out how to do this. Steam doesn’t really make it easy to set up but it does work well, and it’s both free and easy for people to watch.
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Agreed. It most certainly should change, as it’s clear that youtube has a monopoly at this point… but that’s going to take some acknowledging that not everyone is going to be technologically savvy enough to install other programs that are open source. It seems to me that ease of use, accessibility, and security should be the three primary considerations for building alternatives that benefit the public.
[ETA] It strikes me that as we think about the internet moving forward, if we can get people to understand that the it is a public utility, that we should do a bit more than just build up publicly accessible broadband network, but maybe also think about a state sponsored, open source alternative to platforms like youtube? I’m not sure what, exactly that would look like, but that could be a thing…?
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