OnlinePhim.net Blog

Earlier today Veoh had once again applied the 5-min previews rule … this time, it’s down to 20+ minutes. Who didn’t see this coming? Raise your hands … don’t be shy … it’s not your fault for being naive … I mean hopeful. I’ve watched a once-promising service go from unlimited viewing length, down to 1 hour, down to 45 minutes, and now down to 20 minutes. Recognizing a trend here? Whooosh … that’s the sound you hear as Veoh flushes it’s userbase down the toilet like some gold fish. This problem does not only concern regular visitors to the sites but also to whoever happen to embed their player into his/her sites (or blogs). If you depend on much of this for your main contents, you’re pretty much screwed. I estimated that about 2/3 of videos on veoh had effectively become obsolete. Yes, you can still view them on the veoh.tv application, but that this is buggy, has very few features that you actually wanted, and bloated with everything else. Nice interface is no substitute for functionalities. Veoh is famous because of it’s high quality streaming videos (comparing to youtube and the likes). Streaming … as in no need to download and install desktop application or new plugins to view the videos. Now, trying to compete with Joost and other emerging IPTV services, they’re basically chopping off the hands that feed it. I guess that there is no need to feed yourself when you have the money hire people to do it for you. (I’m not even going to comments on it’s executives which came from such companies as Viacom and TimeWarner.)

Like always, they never publicly annouce anything. You have to dig through the discussion forums to find out about it. The forums moderators? Always useless. All they can say is “don’t shoot the messengers”. I say … do what they do in 300 … and shoot the messengers. Without the pawns, the game of chess would be over pretty quick. Personally I don’t see the point in talking to them anyway, they are not the decision makers; complaining to them won’t change a thing. Heck, people started complaining when they start limiting the viewing for videos over an hour long, and look where it is now. Oh well, at the end of the day, they are in the business of making money … and the bottom line will always be … profits.