Mucking about with music video streams isn’t the only misuse of YouTube I’ve been enjoying lately.
Here’s a game called A Car’s Life which is based entirely in YouTube. Click the annotations to save the car, but be quick!
As to how it works, each level has a different video with an annotation linking to the next level. If you let any video play to the end, you’ll see the bad outcome.
It’s a very simple game but from the relative proportions of view counts from level to level, we get an indication of many people have been successful. As you’d expect not everyone proceeds and it’s lower for each successive level. But obviously we don’t know how many good players are just abandoning the game – either because they’re analysing its technical aspects, or because they’ve decided to close it and get back to work.
If you want to upload and share video, there are some good competitors to YouTube – Blip.tv, Vimeo and Viddler all spring to mind. Each seems to focus on a unique set of subtle distinctives and strengths.
But YouTube remains the leader for sheer width of content, particularly music videos. If you want to find a well known video, it’s likely to be on there.
As such it’s long been the de facto site for video and its layout has become very familiar. It’s hard to imagine this advert working on any other video site. (Keep watching…)
http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii
Perhaps a good example of a phoney site put to a good use rather than phishing? You may find that the view count is not very reliable.
Clearly the singular popularity of YouTube has led to their unique advertising deal with Nintendo here.
As other video sites grow though, some will chip away at YouTube’s lead. I wonder if there’s any scope for a dedicated video search engine which indexes them all and is impartial. After all, Google own YouTube. Can we trust the standard search box to index all the other video sites fairly and prominently? Searching for videos there is already quite hit-and-miss. Its format remains largely unchanged since its pre-YouTube days, when online video was relatively undeveloped. For video, all we’ve had from Google since then has been Google Video – but that only indexes itself and YouTube.
All I want is the old footage of Les Dawson playing The Entertainer deliberately wrong on his piano. It’s nowhere to be found.