So here is a small sample of video sites you should check out that many people feel are better than YouTube.
Current TV is about what’s going on in your world: all the things you and your friends are actually interested in — that you won’t find on any other news site or cable TV channel. Current.com is the place to find and share stories and videos that are interesting to you. It connects to Current TV, a global cable and satellite TV network.
TED is unique in the world of streaming video, and it is brilliant in its own way. TED’s whole concept is to spread ideas, and to accomplish that, it has enlisted some of the most brilliant minds in the world to create “talks” about topics as diverse as Eve Ensler’s “Embrace your inner child”, Murray Gell-Mann’s “Beauty and truth in physics” or Bill Gates’ “Mosquitos, malaria and education”. Better than YouTube in another way, the search on the site also works in an ingenious way, letting you search by keywords or by themes such as: inspiring, beautiful or fascinating. For those of us who are eternal students, TED is a jewel of endless facets.
Big Think is a global forum connecting people and ideas.
It may be a cliché to say that knowledge is power, but that doesn’t make the statement any less true. We know that there are just 24 hours in a day, that you are bombarded with information, and that the bombardment will only escalate. We believe that not all information is equal. We believe that expertise is invaluable and should be shared. If you had a heart problem and could afford the counsel of the world’s leading cardiologists, you would seek their advice. If you owned a business and wanted to expand into China or Russia, you’d want to hear from people who had already done that. If you planned to write a novel or a screenplay, you’d want to get pointers from the world’s leading writers. At Big Think, we put you in contact with the ideas of very smart people.
Atom : If you think YouTube videos are funny, you’ve never visited Atom, previously Atom Films. With an enormous array of animations, comedy shorts and sketches, Atom hasn’t lost its edge after its acquisition by MTV. Because of its huge selection of talented filmmakers who normally contribute to the site and with their own staff filmmakers, who were selected from some of the funniest sites online, Atom manages to consistently have shorts that will lighten up the most boring of days.
Blip.tv : We’ve been leveling the playing field for independent shows since May 11, 2005. Independent show creators are great at making content. We’re great at technology, business development, distribution, marketing and advertising sales. It’s a match made in heaven.
More than 48,000 independently produced Web shows use blip.tv to reach more than 22,000,000 people. We distribute more than 2.4 million episodes from these shows across the entire video Internet and onto television screens across the country. Advertisers like Johnson & Johnson, Warner Brothers and Progressive Insurance advertise with us and we share revenues 50/50 with show creators.
5 Min : Did you ever want to know how to photograph a red squirrel, how to reduce poverty in developing worlds or how to go geocaching with your kids? Well, you can find all of those answers and much, much more on 5min.com, the site that will try to teach you how to do almost anything in 5 minute videos.
World Wide Internet TV (WiwTV) : WwiTV is more an aggregator than a video site, since it doesn’t store the videos itself, but merely points at videos in other sites. The reason it made this list is that it points at video channels from all over the world, so if you’d like to watch a soap opera from Azerbaijan or a music video from Vietnam, you can find it all on WwiTV. The quality is generally quite poor and the site itself is quite an eye sore, but where else would you find a North Korean video as top selection of the day followed closely by the Hellenic channel in Greece?
Vimeo : Since it was created by filmmakers, Vimeo shows a very holistic and welcoming approach to video sharing. Vimeo tends to attract more professional filmmakers than other sharing sites, the video tends to be higher quality and the design certainly beats YouTube’s messy look. The community projects and groups also make it easy to find videos of a particular topic or subject matter and with almost 3 million members and over 17000 videos uploaded daily, there is a lot to choose from.
Stickam : The proposal of sites like Stickam is very innovative. Let the audience participate by streaming their own video live. For most part, it works in an exciting way. Some shows are scheduled and you can stream your own video as an audience member and talk to the hosts or video chat among other viewers. It’s like being part of a live audience and always carrying the mike. You can also watch pre-recorded shows and interviews.
The one issue is that for a large part of the day, the site seems to be inhabited by the people who are most at ease with webcams, young teenagers. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if you are looking for some more experienced discussions you must select your live streams carefully.
Blinkx : Why bother visiting a bunch of video sites looking for viral videos when you can find it all on one site? Boasting to be world’s largest video search engine with over 35 million hours of video from all major video sites, Blinx even claims to have indexed more media searches than Google. All you have to do is type in a keyword and you get results from major sites all at once.
There are literally thousands of streaming video sites to choose from, built just to entertain or inform you. Some are very niche, some copies of what we’ve already seen. The ones above are a taste of those I find myself checking out on a regular basis. What are your favorite ones and why?
ins to your computer. Using Thumba you can resize and crop your image, rotate it, flip it or and even produce a mirror effect. You can also tweak your image using one of several brushes including a blur brush, sharpen brush, color brush, spray, gray scale and pinch.
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