Youtube is hard to avoid. Since its inception (and subsequent absorption Google) it’s very much become the default online video site. Even with competitors that offer a much better experience it seems to be nigh impossible to to get any sort of traction against Youtubes dominance.

I’ve edited and published more than my fair share of video to both Youtube and it’s next biggest rival – Vimeo. There have been some good features added to Youtube, something like automatic closed captioning is one, but in my mind most of the new features Google add seem to be more focused at monetizing Youtube and keeping it out of legal troubles and rarely improve it for us – the users. Of course anyone who has used Vimeo knows it offers a more complete experience and more tailored to the end user be them uploader or viewer.

But even with posting a clip on Vimeo its pretty much impossible not to have to stick the same one on youtube to guarantee complete exposure.

And to that end (and the motivation for this post) why does Youtube still not offer the ability to replace a clip without deleting the old one and reposting it fresh. If you do ‘reupload’ its considered a whole new clip – which of course resets views, deletes comments and forces a new link to be made – and making for a huge pain in the ass if you spot an issue in the clip after posting it.

There are of course other issues, such as Youtubes constant desire to re-compress even perfectly encoded MP4 files and the time limit of 10 mins for any single clip but that can wait until I get annoyed by them (again) in the future.

I suppose in some ways it confirms what I think most monopolies general rule – “If it’s broke, and the users still come, then why fix anything. We win either way.”