From the help page, it seems that video uploads are limited to 5 minutes, 10MB and mpeg4 format or rather these limitations are expressed as recommendations for the video uploads. The similarities to YouTube go beyond the front page. Here is the page listing the 20 most viewed videos that seem to be on the site:
The page that displays the individual video has much of the functionality you are accustomed to on YouTube. This screenshot is of the video "Evolution of Dance" (very funny) on MyVideo:
and here is the YouTube version:
As with YouTube, MyVideo offers users the ability to embed videos from the site in their own blogs as well as to link to the source video. The MyVideo seems to have a couple local videos which is an advantage of a local video sharing site. On the other hand this is not quite a home grown site.
On the one hand I support South African innovation but this is not innovation. The MyVideo site looks like the last generation of YouTube probably because the template was copied from YouTube. The people behind MyVideo get a silver star for working to create a local space for local video content (benefit of the doubt here) and fail miserably for slavishly copying YouTube’s older format. My suggestion (aside from a bulletproof set of terms of use to protect them against inevitable copyright infringement lawsuits) is that the site be rebuilt as a South African site and not some copy of a successful formula, perhaps in the hope that it will be bought for, say R1.65 billion …
Tags: myvideo, youtube, youtube clone, video sharing, criticism, copy, copyright
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What do you think?