The New York Times has an article about A Site for the Videos You Don’t Want Everyone to See. The site is called VidMe, and the idea is that you can use it to share videos with the people you know and love rather than with the entire world, as is normally the case with video sharing sites.
Well actually it is normally the case that video shared online is shared with people you know and love, the entire world is vanishingly unlikely to be watching clips of your family picnic along with your Ma and Da. But they could, should they choose, and that might matter.
In the comments on the NYT article the objections to this service seem to mainly be
1 that it is not possible to make anything on the web truly private
2 that you already can limit who can view videos using existing video sharing sites
Objection 1 is a well-rehearsed argument about online privacy being a pointless endeavour. I disagree with it, but that’s not really what interests me here.
One of the sites mentioned in support of Objection 2 is SmugMug. Now you may very well be able to upload private video to SmugMug, but what it promises is that “You Look Better Here”.
Compare this to VidMe and its question “Tired of sharing everything with everyone?”.
SmugMug’s upfront offer is:
- Unlimited photos
- No ads or spam
- Gorgeous galleries
- Stunning HD video
VidMe’s is:
- Privately share videos with only those you want
- Always see who has access to each of your videos
- Easily remove anyone’s access to any video instantly
- Take control of your online sharing
As Clay Shirky would have it, these services are making different, in fact contradictory, promises – the first is promising to make your media look professional and slick (presumably in order to impress people) and the second is offering to hide your media from all but the people you choose to share it with (presumably to communicate with people you know).
You could post video online before YouTube promised to let you “Broadcast yourself”. The fact that is has long been possible to restrict viewing of your videos doesn’t mean that it isn’t important when someone thinks it’s worth launching a service based specifically around doing that.
This is a service offering (a clunky and inconvenient) way to use video not to broadcast yourself but to talk to your friends. Few enough of existing video sharing sites are about that. The idea of broadcasting yourself has become the main way of conceiving of online video, even personal video. This is different.
