cloneVideo.com - What do you think?

fattony · #1 (**permalink**) 08-26-2006, 02:10 PM

Hey all,

I know this is my first post and I know I'm plugging my own site. But all I want to do is get some feedback from you guys on our new video-bookmarking website. Anyways, the service is free.

If you're interested in checking it out, then just go to www.clonevideo.com/beta. You will be prompted for a username and password, enter "beta" (without the quotes) into each field. Then you are free to browse the site and sign up for an account.

I'm looking forward to your thoughts on it.

fattony · #2 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 12:17 AM

Did anybody check it out?

Marc Peters · #3 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 09:04 AM

Honestly? I think it's yet another youtube clone that's missed the party by about 2 years.

fattony · #4 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 10:27 AM

Really, thats interesting. What makes you say that?

Youtube is for uploading videos, you cant upload videos on our site. You can bookmark videos on cloneVideo from a huge range of video-hosts.

Not everybody just uses Youtube. Anybody else?

The Guru · #5 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 10:39 AM

Firstly... why do you have to register? You can see loads of videos for free on Putfile, metacafe, youtube ad-infinitum.

I like the idea but, as Marc says, you're offerring something which is laready there, known and free.

Marc Peters · #6 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 10:43 AM

I don't see a market for what you're doing.

You're trying to accomplish what youtube et al do at great expense by not providing users with the ability to upload videos. In fact all the videos you've "bookmarked" so far come from youtube. What if they decide they don't particularly like you providing this service (which they pay millions for) and block your site from displaying videos?

As a business model it's flawed, and as a concept it doesn't add any value to what's already out there; video sharing communities such as putfile already have more videos than you'd ever be able to watch.

fattony · #7 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 05:19 PM

Fair points.

But how do delecious survive, how do webjam survive. They are all essentially bookmarking service, wether it be for webpages or music Why do I want to browse delicious/webjam when I can just search google? Because delicious/webjam has quality content/music.

Over half of what I watch on youtube is crap. You have yo search for a while b4 finding a good quality video and the ratings don't seem to help. So by coming to our site you can search a hge array of video-hosts at once and when you view bookmarked anything(video, music, webpages( you can be pretty sure its going ot be of good quality.

Its essentially a video aggregator, this is not a video-host. We just make it easier to organize and share your media files online. We are not trying to be like Youtube, we don't want to be running a company with $1 million bandwidth costs.

Also, youtube would never stop us linking to their video for a few reasons. First, they do allow users to embed their player in their site, blog etc anyway. But secondly, all of our users usually go back to the original page the video came from to view/add comments etc.

Edit: Just one last question, you say that we are going to great expense, where do you see the expense coming into the service?

fattony · #8 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 05:23 PM

Originally Posted by The Guru

Firstly... why do you have to register? You can see loads of videos for free on Putfile, metacafe, youtube ad-infinitum.

I like the idea but, as Marc says, you're offerring something which is laready there, known and free.

You dont have to register to use our search function or to watch a video. You only register if you are interested in bookmarking video. What made you think you had to register to watch the videos?

Marc Peters · #9 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 05:45 PM

Originally Posted by fattony

Edit: Just one last question, you say that we are going to great expense, where do you see the expense coming into the service?

Youtube are the ones going to great expense.

Del del.icio.us and the like exist because they're giving people something they want. Perhaps I'm out of touch with your target audience, but I honestly don't see how your service will be in great demand. There aren't really that many video download sites; Compare the number of video commiunities to the number of websites in the world and you'll get an idea of why del.icio.us is so popular.

I'd be delighted if you came back here in 6 months and declared it a success, but I think you're lacking that 'killer' feature. If I knew what it was, I wouldn't be here tapping out this reply. If there were several million video download sites, I could understand. As it is, there isn't. And I think there will be a rationalisation of the video communities that do exist over the next few years as media companies buy into the sites and put more controls over the content.

I just get the feeling that because there is so much shite on these sites, you'll just end up with filtered shit. It'lll still be shit. If on the other hand you wanted to see some good shit, visit http://www.atomfilms.com/

fattony · #10 (**permalink**) 08-27-2006, 05:58 PM

I suppose it's true that you may not be part of the demograph for our site (No offence) - You also make a good point about why delecious is succesful. But there are over 100 major (by major i mean actually drawing good amounts of visitors), video-hosts. I think the amount of videos on each of these sites, while nothing compared to the amount of websites on the web, is still a colossal number. Enough to warrant a bokkmarking site IMO.

This is the first time we have run into ppl not really "digging" the idea. But thanks for the feedback, it's better than we cud have hoped for. Especially, your point on "no real killer feature". This has been pointed out to us by another person. But we have a few ideas that we cud implement.

-Oisin