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

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/10/vidly-brings-hd-video-to-twitter/

by chrysb • 17 years ago

63 81 17 years ago

jraines2• 17 years ago

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.

danielrhodes3• 17 years ago

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

dilanj• 17 years ago

Real-time feature releases, nice work Dan!

jraines2• 17 years ago

Awesome - thanks!

DarkShikari6• 17 years ago

Someone should tell them to upload their encoder; they're apparently about 4 years out of date, which would explain why their video quality is rather subpar for the claim of "HD".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Even Youtube does a better job keeping modern than this; there's no excuse for startups to be using outdated technology.

alain940404• 17 years ago

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).

DarkShikari6• 17 years ago

As the lead developer, I can say quite confidently that the encoder matters a huge amount more than the standard.

See:

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/qual...

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=164

http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=102

As you can see, a bad H.264 encoder (e.g. Apple's) can barely compete with Xvid.

The entirety of my work on x264 is contained in the past 2 years of development. The psychovisual optimizations alone probably account for at least a 50-70% improvement in compression quality.

chrysb8• 17 years ago

Why don't you elaborate and tell us what exactly is out of date and we'll look into it.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!

DarkShikari6• 17 years ago

Your x264 encoding library is quite outdated (read: years). Newer versions are faster, more efficient, and give higher quality output. You can get the latest at http://git.videolan.org/?p=x264.git;a=summary .

If you need any assistance, drop by #x264 on Freenode.

I'm always surprised by how video startups--whose most important technical resource is their video conversion system--don't seem to do sufficient research into how it actually works (or for that matter, how well it actually works). This may be because of the assumption expressed in posts like http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=933713: that all software is pretty much equal and it doesn't matter what you use or how you use it.

Then again, I can't be too harsh, because you at least used open source tools instead of Flash Media Encoder, so you must be doing something right ;)

alain940404• 17 years ago

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.

alaskamiller• 17 years ago

A Twitter-integrated video site. Now displays HD.

alain940404• 17 years ago

Do we need one railroad company per town? So now there would be a video site that is twitter-friendly (in HD), another one that is youtube friendly, another one that is voice-mail friendly... How many different video sites can we have?

diego• 17 years ago

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.

DarkShikari6• 17 years ago

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

chrysb8• 17 years ago

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

kierank• 17 years ago

A transport stream (that is used in digital TV and Blu-Rays amongst other things) segments video/audio into 184 byte payloads. It's not that much different really.

axod10• 17 years ago

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.

chrysb8• 17 years ago

Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.

tsally3• 17 years ago

Facebook status message. Enter Twitter. Exit axod.

Hi. Good to see the CEO of the company posting on this thread. Just in case you were not aware, Twitter launched before you were able to tag other people in your Facebook status. Tagging a person, however, is just one of many differences between Facebook status and Twitter. There are no hash tags, no lists, and no trending topics on Facebook. More importantly, on Twitter you can get direct access to the words of celebrities and other notable people. On Facebook typically all you would see would be an HR maintained fan page.

There's a big difference between that and getting a direct line via Twitter. I'll give a concrete example. A couple of days ago I was able to ask Jason of 37signals whether he knew of a copy of his talk from Start Up School besides Justin.TV. He responded to me within an hour. Interaction like this is not possible via Facebook status updates. It seems to me that your claim that Twitter built something that already existed isn't true.

As a side note, your tone seems a bit confrontational for what I would have expected from a YC CEO.

axod10• 17 years ago

Convince me why a twitter targeted HD video site needs to exist?

How are you different from any general video sharing site on the net?

Facebook consider "Able to share a video in status update" as a small add-on feature. Why when it's in the twitter world is it considered a good idea for a startup :/ Surely you can appreciate to some, this seems bizarre.

pg6• 17 years ago

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.

axod10• 17 years ago

Apologies if it was taken that way. FWIW The vidly website looks cool. I just can't see why people will switch from youtube.

I simply can't fathom how this can end in a good way:

  startup = {name:"twitter"};

  while(true) {
      if (startup.isHyped()) {
          startup.getMoreFunding();    // People invest in things that have hype

          // Others see it as good idea to build something based on it!
          var newStartup = {feature:["search","share video","share numbers","twitter porn","twitter lolcats"]};
          // newStartup implements the feature

          // Child hypes up the parent some more
          startup.hype += newStartup.hype;

          startup.acquire(newStartup);  // When you're 100% reliant on the parent, where else can you go :/
      }
  }

I just can't see how the loop can end with anything other than an OutOfFundingException.

I certainly wasn't trying to insult Vidly, more try and understand the rationale for such a startup existing. As I say, if it's facebook, being able to share video is just an extra feature they add. Like 'search' and handling urls properly. Why so different for twitter? Why must there be a startup dedicated to searching tweets, that twitter acquire? Can't they search their own data? Why does another company need to do url shortening?

As an exit, surely if you build on something else, you really limit your chances of being acquired to that parent. And if the parent is just funded by investors and not revenue... :/ Just seems flakey to me.

Do you think vidly can be profitable? Isn't it pretty risky building on twitter? What if twitter blow up? Do you expect any other potential exit other than twitter acquiring them with their own funding?

crescendo2• 17 years ago

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.

danielrhodes3• 17 years ago

Before we started Vidly, we did a test on YouTube out of interest and it took us well over 15 minutes to sign up and post a video to YouTube. It takes a very small fraction of that to post to Vidly.

dannyr2• 17 years ago

crescendo,

Actually YouTube integrates with both Facebook and Twitter now. Go to My Account > Settings > Sharing and you can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Once you upload a video, it will automatically update your status for both services.

I use YouTube for my uploads mainly because it's one of the built-in upload options for Android. I believe this is true for the IPhone too.

ak1394• 17 years ago

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.

Tichy• 17 years ago

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

DanielBMarkham3• 17 years ago

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)

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

Related Stories