Donations and a New Storage Server

Nya-chan Production · Post by **Nya-chan Production** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 7:46 am

I have to agree there. I checked a few videos on boochsack before downloading them (especially those where someone recommends me them but they have music/anime I don't like much).
And the high quality function on boochsack is getting more spread every day and is of reasonable quality nowadays, for 320*240.

Bauzi · Post by **Bauzi** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 8:22 am

Scintilla wrote: Have you tried the "watch in high quality" option recently, for those videos that have it?

Even old videos have this function. I didn´t believed it first, but than I tried it with an older vid of my on the tube and it really worked. I still don´t get if the tube saved two files in the past or they convert it directly from the vid on the server or something.

Add &fmt=18 to a YT URL and it works.

Fatimah · Post by **Fatimah** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 9:40 am

Streaming is horrible, I've got a 4MB dsl line and even when its high quality (HQ) as they say, the quality is far lower than expected.

It might be a good idea to have a set fixed fee for the base membership/month. you could still implement the system you currently have which signifies the donator's status level but having a set fee before any videos can be downloaded would ensure you have more than enough funds. (you can give a 15 second preview of the videos, something like amazon does with the music sampler)

kinggreg10 · Post by **kinggreg10** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:00 pm

Fatimah wrote: It might be a good idea to have a set fixed fee for the base membership/month. you could still implement the system you currently have which signifies the donator's status level but having a set fee before any videos can be downloaded would ensure you have more than enough funds. (you can give a 15 second preview of the videos, something like amazon does with the music sampler)

But as stated earlier by some one this may lead to issues legally and or members complaining as i for one if i dont have enough money to even send once what gives you the idea i could then? out of the thousands of members how many actually donated? think if you force all to pay how many will stay? when you could just goto another site... but another thing which you have left out... sure this would work great for on site videos but then people will start hosting them else were like on their own site which defeats the purpose of this site :/ sure entered into the DB but what point if they are good enough people will know of them and their site...

The second one is the legal issues... every one should remember a few years back right? what happened then... well if this site sets up a "You pay per video" service then both industries would want a piece of the action with out regards if that site makes enough money or not to survive... Or in other words this site could be gone allot sooner then implementing this... as buying rights to thousands or songs aint cheap. also by doing this you could just throw the admin in jail too... which im sure he dont want either

bluetrain · Post by **bluetrain** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:30 pm

The higher the quality of the streaming. The more space used. + The hosted video which = Back to square one.

I don't think streaming is the answer to avoiding this situation in the future, especially high quality streaming...

dreamawake · Post by **dreamawake** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:45 pm

I'll be donating sometime within the next week or 2 hopefully. I've wanted to for awhile, but I could never figure out the donations page very well..

Anyways, not much to be said about anything that hasn't already been said so yeah, expect my donation soon.

Org Profile · Post by **808-buma** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:02 pm

I like the public tv / public radio idea myself - every 6 months or so, my local public radio station holds a fund drive to raise funds for their programing and have 'incentives' such as tee-shirts, cd's, tickets, and the like (either purchased or donated, don't know which) so different donation levels gets you different levels of swag.

Using the public tv/radio analogy, maybe we hold a very publicly visible 'membership' drive once a year to help get new members to donate / remind 'regular' donators it's time to renew and throughout the year, have a more passive campaign to get the 'strays' who happen to wander in. Suggested time for the annual event would be whenever our 'spike' in 'heya - I just saw AMV's at XYZ-con and I want to make one for myself' posts occurs (which I assume is mid summer-time con season?). Say we have whatever month that occurs in be our 'Membership drive' month to hit the most folks coming to the site?

Other than swag, or just the good feeling you get of supporting something you care about, there may be no other incentives required. I mean, no-cost / low-cost incentives might be way to add benefit to our supporting the ORG, but adding features that would dramatically increase costs (either directly or indirectly) doesn't seem like looking at things the right way.

So, for example adding streaming videos to the site for all videos of all donating members would be a large cost (I assume as each vid would have to be converted and stored somewhere), but adding the feature for members to display one of their videos streaming on their member page (clickable) would be a neat added bonus that wouldn't take up a lot of space (as a donating member would have to delete the current streaming vid to choose another one to display) nor cost a lot to implement.

lastly - here's an idea that just occurred to me: many of us are involved in one way or another in the anime convention community (mostly involved in the AMV contests). Might it be possible that those of us who are can get items donated from each of them (say a con tee-shirt or two that has been signed by the notable guests there or somesuch - nor not signed) and then have those be sent to A-M-V.org central for use in the next membership drive? That way, it would be minimal costs for the ORG itself (as I'd think most of the con folks can get a shirt or two for free) and we'd have unique items available as incentives... just an idea.

SQ · Post by SQ » Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:26 pm

808-buma wrote:
lastly - here's an idea that just occurred to me: many of us are involved in one way or another in the anime convention community (mostly involved in the AMV contests). Might it be possible that those of us who are can get items donated from each of them (say a con tee-shirt or two that has been signed by the notable guests there or somesuch - nor not signed) and then have those be sent to A-M-V.org central for use in the next membership drive? That way, it would be minimal costs for the ORG itself (as I'd think most of the con folks can get a shirt or two for free) and we'd have unique items available as incentives... just an idea.

I think this is a good idea, but the "stress" of getting items would really fall to just a few key people... Which may be unfair to them. Who knows, we'd have to ask them.

Anyway, the reason I quote this is because you reminded me that a while back Phade went to AWA. And at AWA he said "If you guys want to donate, just slip me somehting" and him being right there in the flesh and asking, and making whatever speech it was he made at the panel he had, really drove up my initiative to donate, and I'm sure it drove others' as well.

While it would be an expense for Phade, perhaps if we had various "Spokespeople" do something similar. "You know about our awesome little site well, I'm here if you happen to have money you want to donate" type thing. It's still a grey area of course, but this whole site is grey.

I'm just saying that going to cons where AMVers happen to be and asking for donations may help. Of course the really big AMV cons have already passed now, but it's something to look into in the future.

Perhaps any convention that holds an AMV contest where the host of the AMV contest is a member of the site. "...And if you want us to continue to have more amazing AMVs, perhaps you should take a look into donating to the .org..."

I don't know; something like that.

As for everyone's concerns about streaming taking up more space... I believe Phade was saying streaming was something he was aiming to do as a goal. Something for the future. Not something to do right now, but something to do when space isn't so much of an issue.

As an aside:
I have miniDV tapes from AWA 2007 and hi8 tapes from AWA 2006. I would find it hard to believe if anyone wanted these as donation swag, but if they did I'd be up for giving people the masters (or digital copies). Lord knows I haven't edited anything from them (Well, at least not the 2007 ones).

Ghet · Post by **Ghet** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 2:59 pm

ArashinomeAMV wrote:I'll be donating sometime within the next week or 2 hopefully. I've wanted to for awhile

Anyways, not much to be said about anything that hasn't already been said so yeah, expect my donation soon.

x2

probably

jasper-isis · Post by **jasper-isis** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 3:58 pm

Time to clear up a few misconceptions:

The main purpose of streaming is not to generate revenue, to save on expenses, or to attract users from YouTube. Those may or may not be indirect effects of a streaming system, but they're not the main goals.

What we mainly want to do is just to inject new energy into this community by making it easier for people to share videos with one another. Remember when the this place didn't have hosting at all? You'd keep hearing about how a certain video was really great, but it wasn't easy getting to actually SEE it. Needless to say, the videos that weren't talked about as much had an even harder time getting seen. This community really exploded after we started offering local hosting, and I think most of us can agree that it did so in a good way. Now we're faced with a new problem: so many videos are available for watching that we don't have the time or motivation to give everything a fair chance. A lot of people now only download the really buzzed-about videos or just the amvs made by their friends - so we're back in the same boat we were in a few years ago. Ironic, right?

Streaming previews would do a lot to lower the amount of hassle that comes with viewing an amv. Yes, I know it's currently not that hard just click on the local link and download something to your hard drive. But think of all those times when you passed up checking out a video because you were iffy about the song or the anime, or because you've never heard of the editor before and didn't want to waste your time on something that you might not like. Having the option to watch a streaming preview right there on the page would encourage us to give those videos a chance. And I strongly believe that that's an important thing in the development of a community. Sharing is how we discover new talent and new ideas.

That said, we're not going to shove the streaming idea down your throats. It will be a minimalistic program available to donators. I can't speak on the specifics right now because the kinks are still being worked out - Corran will be back later with all of the details - but rest assured that we trying to keep everybody's interests in mind. We'll have a trial period for testing out the new features and getting feedback. If anything, I ask that everybody at least give it a shot, okay?