R.I.P Vessel(Vessel Discussion)

[owenhar1]

As most of you guys have probably have heard Vessel had been bought by Verizon and is going to be shutting down. I wish this would not have happened because I believe it was a great service and provided a nice way to support Linus Tech Tips/Linus Media Group. Do you feel the same? Do you want LMG/LTT to start another early access service?

Answer below or on this google form: https://goo.gl/forms/sAo5rEbShfYpuN6z2.

[dalekphalm]

I'm torn about the Early access service. I think, as a "value-add" for a paid service, it's great.

 

But lots of people who only watched YT bitched and complained about the early access constantly. A lot of LTT viewers seem to be YT fanboys, almost.

 

Personally, I think the idea of diversifying the platforms your business operates on is a good thing, as it ensures that YT doesn't have too much control over the business.

 

I sincerely hope that LMG is able to find a new platform to release videos on - regardless of whether that platform is free or a paid service.

[ChalkChalkson]

Hey guys,

I've written about my opinion a bit on vessel, but one of the not so cool thing about vessel was the 400char lock...

 

TLDR;

Spoiler

Vessel: Nice idea was kinda cool, not as smart as google though.

Would be cool if there was a no-ad thing that still supported the creators.

LMG could host their one vids and/or just embed the videos on the forum on a page that only paying people can see

 

Why did I subscribe to Vessel?

I don't like ads, especially the ads that run on Youtube here in Germany, most are obnoxious: rapid cuts which even trigger epileptics who don't look at the screen, mastered in a way that makes a war-zone sound like a radio-studio and products that have nothing to do what so ever with anything even remotely related to the video I am watching. 

But adblock isn't really an answer... It doesn't recognise the channel I am watching at any given moment so I can't set it up in a way that only blocks ads on channels I do contribute to directly (eg via patreon)... And to be honest, I tried switching it on and off manually but that doesn't work too great either since I usually que some videos up in other tabs.

Well, you might say [read in red-neck voice] "That sounds exactly like the kind of thing dem Youtube Red is made for" but the issue is obvious. At least to 6.7billion people it is.

Vessel seemed to me like a good alternative to Youtube Red which (from my side) it turned out to be.

 

What did I end up liking about Vessel?

In addition to the reasons I subscribed to Vessel I actually found myself enjoying it for some other reasons.

For once it defaulted to a dark background (awesome for night-time watchers ). But much more importantly people who pay for a thing tend to be a little more engaged with it. This, combined with the smaller community lead to friendlier attitudes in the comment section.

 

What didn't I enjoy?

Firstly there was the landing page, while a little nicer to look at as Youtubes (I never use it, I use my email to handle my subscriptions), I definitely would have preferred something chronological. Also Vessel's suggestions for other videos very rarely made me watch one of them (Google is the king of big data after all). The lack of annotations etc. should be self explanatory, as is the 400 character limit. A little more noteworthy is the maximum resolution and bitrate. I actually watch either on 1440p monitors or a 4k TV that is about a meter from my face, so resolution matters as much to me as to pretty much anyone else, so I didn't like the 1080p limit, but online video is a bit more complicated then uncompressed RAW footage, the real limitation is the bitrate, and vessels 1080p looked pretty nice, I still kind of wish they had given the few of us with 50+ Mbit/s downlinks the option to stream at higher res and bitrate.

 

Wishes for the future

If I was the almighty Lord of the Internet I'd add a tab just up there where you see "Forums [...] Staff More" called LMS where one can watch all LMG videos without adds if one pays 5 or 10 bucks a month to LMG. This might be accomplished by a lot of means, I will just list the two most extreme options:

Spoiler

 

The easy way:

Just embed all videos there, as far as I know embedded videos don't play ads.

 

The super mega overkill way:

Get a huge ass server that has all of the videos on it and a bunch of horsepower to actually support streaming. I guess it *should* be possible to get enough of it with 10$ / unique viewer, and the html5 player is very easy to use, if you do it the simple way of just adding the video to the html document. This might not be the most elegant way of doing this, nor is it efficient by any means, but my gutt feeling is telling me that it should be efficient enough to make it possible to run such a thing at 10$/viewer/month.

 

 

Final thoughts:

Vessel was a really nice service, from what I can tell from reading through the comments on the Vessel info video, it seems like they had a community of people like me who want to support the creators but don't like ads, and some people who really liked being part of the "exclusive" club, while neither of these is a particularly unique idea, I think Vessel had a nice concept that was pretty nicely executed. But in a world of Goliaths a slingshot and a sharp mind is not enough some times....

Edited October 29, 2016 by ChalkChalkson

[Mug]

Always hated Vessel

[owenhar1]

1 minute ago, Mug said:

Always hated Vessel

Why?

[ChalkChalkson]

5 minutes ago, Mug said:

Always hated Vessel

Yeah, could you be a little more constructive?

Was your issue not being able to watch the videos the minute they finished editing it? If so I assure you that bufferes are actually very common 

[Mug]

7 minutes ago, owenhar1 said:

Why?

Listed my reasons in my posts on these threads:

[Mug]

10 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Yeah, could you be a little more constructive?

Was your issue not being able to watch the videos the minute they finished editing it? If so I assure you that bufferes are actually very common 

woah there, hold your horses matey

[dalekphalm]

14 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Yeah, could you be a little more constructive?

Was your issue not being able to watch the videos the minute they finished editing it? If so I assure you that bufferes are actually very common 

Even before Vessel, videos were often finished days or weeks before being uploaded.

[teh]

Was a good run, got my refund (so kudos on that). Will wait and see what comes next