Recently I shot a video clip with my iPhone. I wanted to share the video with a handful of friends and family members, but I wanted only specific people to be able to access the video. I decided to try out YouTube's Private Sharing, which allows one to share private videos with upto 50 users.In theory, the solution looks great. But in practice it is a bit frustrating. First, a private video can only be shared with other YouTube users - i.e. a notification will only be sent to an individual, if he/she is already on YouTube. Email addresses (including Gmail addresses) are not accepted. Second, a Gmail user cannot reuse his/her Gmail user name on YouTube. In fact one's Gmail user-id may be taken by somebody else on YouTube. Third, the username selection criteria on YouTube is different from Gmail! For example "." is not allowed in the username on YouTube, whereas it is perfectly fine on Gmail.
Overall, identity on YouTube is not the same as identity on Gmail, More generally, identity on YouTube is not same as identity on the rest of Google, even though Google owns YouTube. Thus the bar for a Google user, who does not have a YouTube account, to receive private video notifications, is artificially high. And since the sender of a video does not have access to his/her Gmail address-book on YouTube, he/she has to recreate an address-book on YouTube and learn the YouTube IDs of the address-book contacts.
YouTube is the goto place for user generated video. So it is a bit of a shame that the user experience for private video sharing is not smoother. Anybody know of tricks or tools to get around the YouTube identity problem?
I just mark the video unlisted and send out the link to people I want to share with. The security is not fool-proof but works if you can deal with the fact that anyone who has the link can view it. My unlisted videos do not show up on my youtube channel either. Thats worked for most of my private sharing needs.
ReplyDeletekapsio - the unlisted link is the path that I ultimately chose. I was hoping to use "private sharing" over unlisted to increase privacy of the individuals in any video, the overall user experience for private video sharing is extremely (beyond the problems I listed in the article above).
ReplyDeleteA friend suggested using Vimeo which allows password protection of content. For the cases where YouTube's unlisted sharing is not adequately, I am planning to use Vimeo's service.