Monday, June 10, 2013

My YouTube RANT

Andy HeadHardHat Smith of the GeoSnippits Reboot Podcast


Should beggars be choosers?

I have a rant and I know that in "The Big Picture" of things in the YouTube world,  I am a teeny tiny fish in a really big ocean. I also know that the "service" YouTube provides is essentially free. With that being said I also provide content to YouTube and they gain advertising marketing off my shows even if it is comparatively small. So here is my gripe, let me know what you think.

On Thursday we recorded episode 021 of the GeoSnippits Reboot Podcast. Everything went fairly swimmingly and the show went out as a videocast as usual - well almost. Our videocast includes our Pre-show, the show itself and the post show. We have a huge audience that absolutely loves the Pre-show and watches it faithfully. Two major things happened with that broadcast. First and the most upsetting to me is only the last 31 minutes of the show was rendered and put out as the show. That means the first hour was NOT included. Luckily it catches the meat of the content that discussed having an effective elevator speech about Geocaching but to lose an entire first hour of the show? I tried, I mean I tried getting in touch with anyone at YouTube/Google to fix this and I can't get a human. I tried their digital feedback routes and have not heard a thing. Is there no way to actually make contact?  

Next a much smaller issue but not a whole lot less frustrating is how we are the beta testers to the OnAir hangouts. Every week we play the What's broken this week game, finding out usually mid show what functionality is going to hose up. This last week they added new functionality to remove the guest bar at the bottom of the hangout screen and you can either show it or not. I prefer it showing because Debaere and I make gestures and faces during the show. Even with the setting for the bar to be on it defaulted with having the bottom bar taken away. You can't tell when you are actually broadcasting so we didn't know until afterwards. Again a small thing but a series of smaller things effects a lot. Come on Guys beta test this stuff before sending it out to the masses. We rely on YouTube to get our content out and I don't think it is too much to ask to make sure this stuff works before making it go live. Being a QA engineer myself, this drives me insane.

I also really do not like the "We are so big we don't have to bother conversing with anyone",  attitude. You own the video world you can afford a decent tech support staff. Putting up a wall from everyone is not good business...

Okay, off the soapbox I'm getting more light headed than usual. Have you had issues with YouTube? What did you do to get them resolved or did they? Let me know.

-HHH


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