Facebook vs. YouTube - Round #1

It’s easy to take for granted all the things that YouTube has built over the past ten years.

Since this week was YouTube’s birthday,  I decided to celebrate by doing a head to head comparison to Facebook to see just how easy it was to share videos on the two services.

I began with trip to Caffe Vivaldi to see my a few of my friends perform in the acapella group Cabaret Sauvignon.

I shot a 3 minute video on my Sony A7 mark II,  and then brought the file home and uploaded it to Aperture.

That’s when the fun began.

Aperture has a ‘Share on Facebook” button,  and a click there shipped the file of to Facebook.  But after two tries – no joy.

Ok,  that might be an Aperture problem,  so I went to Facebook,  then to ‘photo’s’  since Facebook has video under photo’s.  Upload – this time a progress bar,  slow but workable,  then a message “We’ll notify you when your video is ready.”  15 minutes later – still no joy.  And again,  this time from another Facebook upload location – this time with a new notification on screen… but 3rd try – no video on my Facebook. It’s been more than 30 minutes of trying. Ok, maybe it’s the MP4 file – so i use MPEG streamclip to turn it into a .mov and fourth time – no video to Facebook.

So,  how about YouTube.  Upload to YouTube is blisteringly fast – with a clean interface and lots of options to choose thumbnails,  embed codes,  even a easy link to embed. Sadly, Facebook doesn’t seem to allow the YouTube embed link – so after almost an hour… I gave up. 

The point here is – while it’s easy to say that Facebook is going after YouTube video,  in reality the YouTube video product is a mature, solid, and trusted solution.  Facebook is new,  less feature rich,  less workable – and frankly pretty darn complex.

The next morning – I awoke to find 4 videos on my timeline.  It seems that Facebook unjammed itself, or just completed very very slow encoding – but now I’ve got the video on my timeline.  Just for fun,  I went to try and find the embeddable Facebook code that made a ton of  news when it was released a few weeks back.  The instructions aren’t user friendly – clearly the Facebook Player is being offered for developers if you read the FAQ here:  https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/embedded-video-player

But even more frustrating,  none of the ‘embed’  links or buttons that are promised in the FAQ appeared on my videos.  After another half our of poking around – I gave up.  I know Facebook video is supposed to be embeddable,  but for the life of my I can’t figure out how. 

So,  if you want to hear Cabaret Sauvignon –  here’s the clip I posted on YouTube: https://youtu.be/njSyzjt29sc

It’s on my Facebook page as well,  But I can’t figure out the best way to share that public video on a private page at this point.  But just so you don’t think I’m ignoring the power of Facebook video – the 4 videos on my newsfeed have garnered 223 views so far,  and that’s sure to grow over time – even without YouTube’s powerful search engine driving views. 

Overall,  here’s my point.  The video space is competitive,  and sure to become more so over time.   But the YouTube product has huge running start, both in terms of it’s code base and the traffic from search.  So don’t expect that someone is going to spin up a ‘YouTube Killer” anytime soon.  The product deserves to be respected for it’s ease of use,  ubiquity,  and it’s transformational impact on video around the world.  That’s no easy trick to pull off. 

Steven Rosenbaum is serial entrepreneur, author, and filmmaker. His latest book, Curate This! is in print and ebook on Amazon.com.  He is the CEO of Waywire.com (enterprise.waywire.com)