The Blipocalypse is here
So if you’ve been looking around the site today, or attempted to head to Blip.tv to check out my channel you might have run across something like this:
It might have caused a mild sense of panic, but rest assured all my videos are now linking to my Youtube channel. I spent the last month, (and the rest of today) switching over any links on this site that still linked to Blip.tv. (MAJOR thanks to Christopher “Tebble” Torres, for snagging up most of the links for my videos in a text list, so I didn’t have to keep hopping around between Youtube and the site looking for those video links.)
But if you liked watching videos on Blip for… whatever reason… your options are now severely limited. As of today, August 20th, 2015, Blip.tv is no more. Bad decision after bad decision left the site a smoldering crater for a long while now, and only now have the final embers of life within it have been snuffed out.
I saw this coming for a while now. You probably noticed that starting around the Global Agenda review, I stopped using Blip as my player on this site. Things were in hot water already, even before I made the switch, as decisions made by Blip.tv made the switch all the more simple of a “choice” for me to make.
Make no mistake, I HATE YouTube. I hate the culture, the comments, the company, and the copyright strikes that all run rampant within the site. I’m still fighting for the rights to post or monetize videos containing public domain and royalty free songs, or songs that merely play in the background of a game I’m playing. (The Secret World review was only recently flagged, nearly three years of the video being on the site, strike-free)
There was plenty of reason for me to love Blip. The lax policies meant if I wanted to include that clip from a TV show or movie to punctuate a joke, I could DO it. There’d be no sudden concern about the video not playing or being taken down because some company has no idea how Fair Use works… or simply doesn’t care.
I could fix my numerous fuckups within the video without having to reupload the whole thing. That repeated line in ArcheAge? The blank video section in Digimon? The fact I called “Nirn”, “Nim” in the ESO review? All could have been stealthily repaired without many being the wiser. Now, if I want to fix those mistakes, I have to delete the entire video from YouTube, and I’m not about to lose out on the over 200k views on that TESO video because Google Docs has horrible kerning issues.
Blip was still a far lesser company though, as they clearly could have had something great going, but they seemingly had no idea how to handle it.
Channel Awesome… even if you hate Channel Awesome/TGWTG for whatever reason, unquestionably had the biggest hand in turning Blip into the juggernaut it was in 2009. However, rather than sign CA into a contract, or reward users of their platform with more money, they opted to attempt to boost their own numbers by “recruiting” channels from the most popular Youtube channels at the time, offering them absurd amounts of cash to post exclusive content on their site… Channels that were already teetering on the cusp of YouTube has-been status like Fred, Annoying Orange, and iJustine. “Talent infusion”, they called it.
Then there was the first Blipocalypse. Deciding they needed to go in a more “refined” direction, they took the url tag “.tv” a bit too literally, hiring and creating shows with B-Z list celebrities, and forcing CA to host content of channels they personally liked on their site, because some people make very shitty businessmen. This caused Blip to end up flushing out hundreds of channels, and not all of them were “Bob’s Discount Let’s Plays”. Popular and well crafted channels got the cut while some more questionable content remained.
Then they apparently hit some sort of hipster phase, putting an insane amount of promotion into their friends’ channels, and those who held a personal relationship with the main offices. Ads for these shows would pop up in other videos, and exactly what kind of revenue can you make from ads, when the ads come from yourself? This eventually went nowhere, like all their other endeavors.
Understanding that some of the talent they had under them was worth taking, and the fact they had a fairly decent platform, Blip was bought out by Maker Studios. What we were hoping to see was an influx of cash that would improve our CPMs and the stability of the platform. What Maker wanted to do was buy the platform so they could essentially use it, and then kill it. When Maker was THEN bought out by Disney, it got even worse, despite promises it would get better. Regular users of Blip started getting e-mails that Blip was a dead platform walking, and they should probably stop. Then one month ago, we all got a message that Blip would be shutting down all their services on a specific date: Today was that date.
As I said before, I was prepared for this. Everything is fixed now, and as much as I absolutely DESPISE having to use YouTube, my subscriber count is holding well, and regular viewers of the show have been nothing but supportive. It’s working out well enough so far, and I’m glad I had the foresight to see this coming a year ahead of the day it did. If I missed converting over anything, let me know so I can get that fixed. For all those who still have work to do, good luck.
And one final thing…
ABANDON BLIP!
Posted on August 20, 2015, in Miscellaneous, News and Updates and tagged blip tv, youtube. Bookmark the permalink. 14 Comments.
MMO Grinder 
I think we are all worse off for blip going downhill. Now there is no service remotely close to giving YT even an ounce of pause. Everyone is being funneled into a platform where big corps get to decide the rules instead of the law. Fair use is dead.
I hate to be “that guy”, but…good riddance.
As someone who had a lot of people they know lose their videos and channels to the first “Blip-ocalypse”, I’m neither saddened nor surprised that the slow suicide that Blip decided to embark on finally came to fruition.
I only used Blip for a handful of cases as of lately (such as videos from you, Nash, Phelous, et al), and would be more than happy if you found another non-YouTube place to host your vids, tho. Blip was bad, but yah, better ANYTHING than YouTube.
One could make a video entirely composed of the bad decisions that brought Blip where it is today.
I had a few obscure movie & game reviewers on Blip who never backed up to Youtube & disappeared without a word or trace a few years ago. Some of them could possibly even have died. Now their stuff is gone for good.
Regarding the ads on Blip. I remember disabling Adblock for a handful of reviewers, you, Phelous, Obscurus Lupa, & Linkara since he asked. The reason I used it at all was because Blip would play the exact same Disneyworld or Verizon commercial every 5 minutes for an entire month. In all the years I’ve watched you guys on Blip, I’ve never seen anything but adds for those two things, so as I see it Blip’s war on Adblock a few years ago was brought on by the repetition of their own limited advertising.
I honestly do much prefer to watch videos here then on youtube. One huge problem for me is the row of what you could watch next video along the edge of youtube.. once i’m plugged into this, it can be a very vicious loop of video watching, and all my productivity goes down the drain.
Hence why I watch here, and occasionally poop out my two cents since Im not watch 30 videos in a row…
That said, whatever broadcasts those videos really will not bother me too much. I know youtube is particularly dreadful about content restrictions, but they do have much more to lose in court over content and do need to protect themselves better than Blip. I personally blame it as being the ‘We are number one so we must do everything possible to stay that way.” There is not going to be any missteps, or trip ups that that ever will push this horse back to number two, even if they trample down everything you might like about video broadcasting to do it.
That said, as much as you might hate to use it, Youtube is the current best most road to profitability so to speak… So it pays to keep playing with it even if it threatens to bite your hand off and spit it back out into your face ever turn of play.. but I do have to wonder… can you also your same video prepared to Youtube standards on Vimeo or Mp4upload? can you make small changes to each post process to skirt around the issue? At Least then you have videos ready for other uploads feeds and if it gets taken down on youtube, it still might stay up on Vimeo or Mp4Uupload..
And Yes.. my god does that ever hurt to try to say it.. you have to force yourself to vomit it out like a radio announcer.. this better be one damned good video hosting site for the mouth annarchy it has been causing me..
You could just watch the video full screen, and tap out before the video ends. There are ways to curb Youtube addiction.
If only there was a Russian equivalent of Youtube. One thing I’ve noticed about Russian sites is that they seem to give zero fucks about copyright infringement. Of course the other thing I’ve noticed is that Russian sites tend to crawl at dial-up speeds.
Well, that stinks a lot! I haven’t missed it, I must admit. As long as the content gets from you to me, I don’t care how I get it. I am just bummed that there is one fewer competitor to Youtube. Not that companies aren’t trying to create more sites like Blip all the time.
Now they are just a blip.
You seem to be suggesting that Youtube is the only alternative to Blip. I can understand why that would be the obvious fallback, but it’s not like there aren’t a slew of other options. Here’s one example (of many): http://www.mp4upload.com/
None of these other sites will have the same bots trolling for copyright “violations” that Youtube has. I can understand why you might be a little reluctant going with a smaller one, on account of the possibility of them folding (like Blip) and you needing to re-up everything again. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t do both: upload to Youtube and to some other site, for redundancy. Then if the copyright bots take down your Youtube video the other is still there, and if the other service folds then you still have the Youtube video.
I’m considering Vimeo for this option, the biggest pain being that if I lose the vid on YT, no one is going to watch it anyway. My audience on Blip wasn’t exactly sizable, and this site doesn’t pull in nearly the numbers my YT channel has. With no ad revenue streams coming from YT, I’d have only Patreon to rely on to keep the show going, and that can drop by hundreds of dollars with just a few pulled pledges.
It’s really all about ad revenue. The reason so many if us used Blip is because it paid well until it didn’t. Youtube is my best bet to keep a revenue stream going, but despite my dislike with it, it’s a necessary evil.
I like Vimeo!!
((The following text will look extremely advertising alongside a bit long-winded; an unfortunate side-effect I tend to have when writing things.))
I remember suggesting “Playwire” at the MMOGrinder-forums back then you were wondering whether to keep posting to Youtube or Blip:
http://mmogrinder.boards.net/post/1021/thread
I didn’t get to hear or read about your experiences, so here is the suggestion mentioned once again.
Since the first post, some of their policies have been changed (like apparently now auto-playing the videos allows gathering ad-revenues; I’m personally have a it mixed feelings about this change), but generally the service and the video-player has been improved to be even lighter to use and such.
The Premium-service is still there, and they supposedly are still quite lax letting people getting the benefits (like not necessarily must/have/need the 200,000+ views a month on your website and such).
Contacting the customer-service should still get things sorted out without much of trouble. And so far they haven’t shown any kind of interest or plans to even kick me out of the Premium-program, even though I haven’t been uploading there for more than a year now.
Of course once again the biggest two downsides of this service would be:
– Community interaction would be strictly limited to your own personal website
Well, this mainly mean that the (main-)video-comments would only appear on your website. Which segues / segways to:
– Your Website = Your Channel
Which that aside for possible Twitter, Facebook, RSS, or some other semi-3rd-party-manual-updates or newsletters, for the most part there is no “subscribing” to your “channel” to automatically inform new videos and such.
Realistically speaking however, unless a large portion of “Youtube-and-only-Youtube”-folks would migrate to watch your videos on your own personal-website, many might miss seeing your videos in general.
On the positive-side however, since the Playwire-folks don’t automatically assume that you’ll even post the video to worldwide-public, you’re should be quite safe from spontaneous video-take-downs and such (or at least seems so since there’s nowadays also a “Private-Sandbox” meant for you and your family, co-workers & such, hinting that they’re totally okay with them being video-back-up-service too, as long as there storage + “streaming” is covered / paid-for either via ads or with “cold-cash”, like with any other storage-service).
I think that’s enough “selling”-information for now regarding to this service. Their website covers many of the questions the people being converted from Youtube and Blip might have.
Actually, now that I check it again, there is a option to automatically to upload a copy to your Youtube-account also (semi-similar to how Justin.tv / Twitch.tv can do), you wouldn’t need to abandon that channel when starting to use the Playwire as a back-up-service!
Mp4upload.com: they could use with a name that rolls off the tongue better.