YouTube Embedded Video Forces a Site Visit
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Something just changed at YouTube, and let me explain how significant it is. When you embed video using THEIR video embedding techniques, or if you use a Widget, then you're giving up a lot of control over your page, and perhaps even your entire site.
Just yesterday, I was explaining to a friend, and creator of ChangingThePresent.org how Widgets, the type that get embedded into Web pages, are incredibly powerful. No one would do it, but technically the person controlling the Widget (the publisher of the Widget) has the power to do anything they want with the entire page, including stealing data from other Widgets, or even blanking the whole page and replacing it with another.
It's with this coincidental timing of me just explaining this that YouTube decides to go and make its move. Now HitTail, like so many others was leaching off of YouTube's bandwidth to show our own demo. As of today, they started running Previous/Next arrows to step through (seemingly) related video. Also, they're showing a row of postage-stamp video icons that zoom up at you as you mouseover, much like the Macintosh launch pad.
Now I won't describe every nuance I noticed, but the system is rigged to make you end up on the YouTube site, where a little bit of banner advertising is being run. What YouTube has avoided was embedding advertisements INTO the videostream itself--something that could have resulted in users screaming bloody murder. As it turns out, YouTube has experimentally struck a delicate balance between "evil" behavior that pulls you back into their site to show advertising, and leaving the embedded videos intact in a way that the individual site publishers will not pull YouTube video off their sites. The new features arguably enhance the embedded video experience.
One annoying nuance is that even if an embedded video is running, if you click the next arrows repeatedly, it will pop open a new window of the YouTube site, playing the same video. And what you have then is the same video playing twice in two different windows, with the double narration track and all--very disconcerting. But I'm sure YouTube will work out these problems.
They're finally making their move, and thankfully for all of us, it didn't involve embedding ads into the video stream. But still, it makes you wonder what's next.Labels: advertising, Google, video, Widgets, Youtube
posted by Mike Levin
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