OnlinePhim.net Blog

As if the 5-min previews and the popup ads in the videos didn’t annoy people enough (especially if you watch anime or drama with subtitles), here’s another pin for the cushion … Veoh recently decided to block countries that didn’t fit into its business plan. There are already over 160 countries named by users, and the list is growing. You can view the user-generated list here. Yes, Vietnam is on the listed. I’ve test it with a Vietnam IP and veoh does indeed block access.

Unfortunately Veoh will be ending service in your country due to a low concentration of users. Veoh is maintaining markets when we have the highest concentration of viewers.

So what does it actually means? Absolutely nothing. Why? Simple. What Veoh says never is the real story. The 5-min preview is never about the bandwidth or resources (otherwise why is there a veohtv? it still stream the whole thing in flash … it would take the same amout of bandwidth). What they are claiming, according to the above, is that since there not that many people from these country, they might as well block them. Umm .. ok .. :/

Truth is NOT that they don’t have enough users in other countries…. is that they tried block other countries because they tend to post movies and content that cannot be controlled by US laws (being outside US and all). Recently, Viacom (who owns Paramont, CBS, MTV among others) sued Youtube for allowing people posted video contents that Viacom claimed is their properties. Viacom had entered partnership with Veoh and allowing Veoh to post their content but some people post a full length movie that really tick this big corporation off so no one can watch anything full length unless you pay for it. Basically, they want to control to have less people watch their content for free. If you want to watch their content (say a full length show or a movie), you have to pay for it.

The above statement made by a user at Yahoo Answers does raise a good point. Profit is always the center of any business. There’s no point in letting user using your resources if you can’t monetizing that traffic. There are several theories floating around the interweb … dig around if you’re interested in the matter.

Once again, webmasters who using Veoh’s embedding player are scrambling to find alternative solutions. Yes, not just the main site that blocking the users .. the embedding player also block them. Why do you think they pushed out the new player right before the block? Without going into much details, here is a quick list of questions and my answers. Read the rest of this entry »

… so we shall resist no more. Thanks to spammers and wannabe hackers, our viewers has lost the use of the shoutbox (and voting right). Unfortunately, since I’m pretty busy most of my days, I don’t have time to work on a decent user management system and enable those features again.

Many viewers had suggested that we create a myspace or facebook account so that they have a way to keep in touch with us. Personally we don’t like those site, not because we’re antisocial but because they are so littered with so many ads that it’s hard to find your way around.  It’s such a big mess that you can bare know which parts are  actual contents and which are just ads.

However since most of you have either account already, or both, we decided to give it a try. So, for those that are interested … the myspace account we are trying out is located at http://www.myspace.com/onlinephim_net . Feel free to add us or leave a message. Let’s see how this turn out. For those of you who prefer facebook instead … well, let us know … maybe we’ll test that one out too.

Here’s another good news, bad news, post. Ok, let’s start with the bad news first. Over the last 2 and a half months we’ve been trying to bring back one of our servers. Unfortunately it looks like that it won’t be coming back, and along with it … all the videos that were hosted there. We do not have enough resources to archives every video we posted, so it’s almost impossible to back track all the dead links and update them. As of right now, we’re putting a stop-loss on it and move on. Some will get updated, but most won’t. If anyone wishes to volunteer to help update them, or post future videos, let us know. The staffs, and fellow viewers, would really appreciate it.

Now, the good news. All those 5 - 10 minutes videos should be playing fully, at least for now. Yes, it’s been a long time since that problem arise,. We’ll continue to work on it to find a more permanent solution. But for now, enjoy them while you can.

Edit: Look like the fix only worked for approximately a week before they changed the server settings again. Hopefully some people got some use out of that before it went down.

As always, remember that this site is still pretty much in the beta stage. It means that things are constantly changing, things will be broken, updates will be made … so if you find that the site is not working anymore, down the road, try clearing your browsers’ caches and cookies, reinstall plugins …etc .. all the usual stuffs. The staffs are usually hanging around at the forums for extra help if you need any. Yes, it seems pretty inactive there, but we’re always around.