Vidly (YC S08) first to launch HD video on Twitter

[DarkShikari]

Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for the claim of "HD".

    x264 - core 57 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2005 - http://www.videolan.or
    g/x264.html - options: cabac=0 ref=3 deblock=1:1:1 analyse=0x3:0x113 me=hex subm
    e=5 brdo=0 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=0 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone
    =21,11 chroma_qp_offset=0 threads=12 nr=0 decimate=0 mbaff=0 bframes=2 b_pyramid
    =0 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=3 wpredb=0 bime=0 keyint=60 keyint_min=25 scenecut=
    40(pre) rc=abr bitrate=2000 ratetol=1.0 rceq='blurCplx^(1-qComp)' qcomp=0.60 qpm
    in=10 qpmax=51 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 pb_ratio=1.30

Even Youtube does a better job keeping modern than this; there's no excuse for startups to be using outdated technology.

[chrysb]

Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it. We're always open to feedback and you should know that the YC nature is to be constructive and helpful in our community of startups and hackers.

Thanks!

[alain94040]

I'm not an expert, but has H.264 encoding improved that much in 4 years? Usually, it's the standard itself which provides the quality (and H.264 is better than Mpeg-4).

[axod]

If there's a sign of a bubble, it's companies building things that already exist, on top of companies that have no business model. Skeptical.

[crescendo]

The problem with analyzing companies like this is that they don't really admit of a traditional value-based assessment. What is the value proposition of a service like Vidly, really? It shortens the process of posting a video link to Twitter by a few steps. Yes, I'm understating what they do, but when you distill it down to its actual benefit to an end user, that's it.

    Option 1:
        1) Open youtube.com.
        2) Create a youtube account (First time only).
        3) Post video to Youtube.
        4) Open twitter.com, or a Twitter client.
        5) Post a tweet with the Youtube link.

    Option 2:
       1) Open vidly.com (or client?).
       2) Post video and tweet to Twitter.

You've reduced the steps it takes to post a video to Twitter from 5 to 2; big whoop, right? But looking at this alone misses the point. Here's where it gets interesting: given that they're both free, and that users actually know about Option 2, most of them will choose Option 2 without hesitation. Besides that, the relative complexity of using Youtube for this task might have been a barrier for many people who otherwise would've posted videos. When you combine this with good marketing, the vibrant user base of Twitter, and a large mass of people hungry to broadcast videos, big things can happen.

[pg]

Really? That's the sign of a bubble? What other instances of this pattern were you thinking of?

I think you just wanted to say something insulting about Vidly, but couched in a form that seemed intellectually respectable. In content your comment is isomorphic to the kind of troll posts you see in TechCrunch threads.

[chrysb]

Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.

[alain94040]

Can someone explain the rationale behind such a service? Twitter and HD video? I must be showing my age, but what is the point? I'm genuinely curious to understand what kind of company they are trying to build. Do they want to take down youtube?

Someone please spell it out for me.

[diego]

My understanding is this: sometimes you want to tweet a link to a video. If the video is not already on Youtube, you have to upload it first. The last time that I did this, the following steps were required:

- browse your file system for the video (starts uploading as soon as you select it) - while it uploads, fill in the title, description and tags. The title could be your status update, the other fields are not necessary if all you want is to tweet the video. - click submit and wait a few minutes (varies depending on their load) until your video becomes available for viewing - copy the url and compose a tweet including it

It would be easy to create a mobile or web app to streamline this process using the Youtube API(e.g. type in your tweet, chose/record a video, submit and forget. We'll fill in the details and publish your tweet when the video is available). It's probably been done.

Vidly looks like yet another video site, only it attempts to be Twitter-friendly by incorporating that feature from the start.

[alaskamiller]

A Twitter-integrated video site. Now displays HD.

[DarkShikari]

For a moment when I read the headline, I thought they were sending videos over Twitter by splitting them into 140-character data segments.

[chrysb]

Let me know if you can figure that out and we'll implement the feature asap.

[jraines]

A suggestion for Vidly: please make a video's view count available through the API. I just went with YouTube + bit.ly for a video & twitter related thing I'm doing because I have to have access to the view count.

[danielrhodes]

Thanks for the suggestion! It will be in the next push, later today.

[DanielBMarkham]

Somebody dropped the ball here.

Not only is this possible with a few clicks -- it's already possible with no clicks at all.

It's an entire company devoted to replacing one feature that already works fine on an immensely popular site.

Just set up AutoShare. When you upload a video, you get a tweet (and FB and others get notified as well if you've set it up to cascade)

Where was the value again?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nGsF0YR7NU (instructions on how to set this up on YouTube)

[Tichy]

Very impressive. I didn't think it was possible to compress HD videos into 140 bytes.

[ak1394]

I don't know how popular a service like that is going to be.

I'm doing something similar at the moment - a combination of Twitter client for j2me phones that beside normal twitter functions allows taking photos/videos/audio recordings and a web site to display recorded material.

I've been live for about a month, and surprisingly I'm not seeing many users recording videos. Most would use it as a normal Twitter client, and some maybe will snap a few photos.