24 Jul, 2008
Why removal of gaming videos from Vimeo is dangerous for the web
Image via WikipediaA few days agoo Vimeo, popular service for video hosting, announced on their staff blog, that they’re no longer going to allow gaming videos on their service. The full policy of their removal is:
The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed.
Full blog post at vimeo staff blog.
I think this is really bad for the service and their social contract with the web in general, since it breaks all the web-pages that embed their videos. The fact that Vimeo decided to remove the old videos means that after 1st of September, a lot of old blog posts, forum links and such will be suddenly broken. As such I think that they should keep old files, just disallow uploads of new ones.
Why am I concerned with this? The truth is, I’m not uploading any gaming videos or even understand the idea behind it. I am on the other hand the person who decides for Zemanta, where we should host our online content, like our screencasts.
The fact that there are already a lot of reviews out there that embeed our screencast, makes me worried what could happen in the future if the Vimeo team decides that screencast is not artistic expression enough, or that our videos do not foster proper community. Will they ask us to remove the videos, in turn breaking old blog reviews?
While I’m not ready to move away from Vimeo for now, it does make me feel somewhat uneasy about the choice in first place and I’ll watch out for an alternative video site for new uploads.
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