When I profiled new broadband video portal Gotuit earlier this week, I was surprised by the negative feedback in both my comments section and in the Slashdot story comments. Some of those criticisms were technical – e.g. Mind Booster Noori pointed out that Gotuit requires Flash > 7, which means that Linux users are excluded. But more importantly a lot of people didn’t buy the “No Buffering” part. Noted one sarcastic Slashdot commenter:
“Wow, streaming video without any need to buffer — it just starts playing with 0 bytes. And look! You don’t even have to download it — the video must just automagically appear on your hard drive or something.”
I do love Slashdot sarcasm though – you can tell real techies by their sarcasm. Anyway all I can say in my defence is that the streaming was very fast in my testing – and I still think it is much better than the average broadband media site. But your mileage may vary.
Of course there are other broadband video offerings on the market. BroadRamp was mentioned by R/WW commenter Raoul Nachi, who called it the “best streaming video i’ve ever seen”. Also a VideoWebTown.com rep popped into my comments to pimp their product. Other broadband video services include broadbandsports, Brightcove, blip.tv, Limelight Networks (which Markus Frind ridiculed in his latest post) and of course YouTube.
Also recently come to my attention is a new initiative called Open Media Network, which “lets you download, watch and listen to educational and public service programs.” This service comes with a free player (Windows or Mac – sorry once again to Linux users!). PBS has announced it is using Open Media Network for its “download to own” initiative. This enables PBS fans to purchase episodes of PBS programs on demand – each episode is $1.99 for unlimited playbacks, except for NOVA which is priced at $7.99 per episode.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)