CTV has my YouTube video yanked

I was just going through my many videos posted on YouTube. The first one I ever posted was one year ago.  It was a little comedy piece where I took the news tickers from all the news channels, lined them up on the screen with special effects, and let them race to see which one was fasted.  My hypothesis: the channel with the slowest news ticker had the stupidest viewers (because they can't read very fast.)

The winner was CNN.

I just got a notice from YouTube that CTV had my video pulled.  All it was was a sliver from their screen showing thirty seconds of their NewsNet news ticker.

Since their news clipping services will read this post, I offer everyone the following video saluting lawyers. I own the rights of every pixel, so don't worry. 

The SaskTel Max Disgrace

I'm trained in television production, have worked in various roles in the industry for nearly twenty years.  As a disclaimer: three of those years were with the local cable company.  My eyes are well-trained on video quality, but what SaskTel has done here should be offensive to every individual who has subscribed to their service.

In late October my family switched from cable to SaskTel Max.  We enjoyed a four month preview of most of the channels.  Well, 'enjoy' is a strong word.

My impression was negative right from the start. The installer spent the entire day in our home.  Max is supposed to come with wireless internet.  One of our computers couldn't connect to the network and the installer and subsequent computer help people who came by couldn't get it running, even though that computer was connected to a wireless router prior to the SaskTel install. I got it running the next day.

Then, when I tried to phone for customer support, my 2.4 gigahertz phone killed the tv connection EVEN THOUGH THE TV CONNECTION ISN'T WIRELESS.  Interference with the wireless router's internet connection by a cordless 2.4 Ghz phone is normal. Killing the TV signal is not. Customer support said that it does happen with their equipment and I should either not use the wireless internet function or turn down the signal strength.  I turned down the signal strength but it still happens. So I bought a new phone that uses the 5.8 Ghz frequency.

There are still constant, daily outages of our signal.  The whole thing goes down for thirty seconds at a time, sometimes longer.  Friends who also have SaskTel Max tell me this is a frequent occurrence. This is especially frustrating when you're watching an on-demand movie and you have to spend ten minutes slowly fast forwarding it to the end every time this happens because the system forgets where you were in the movie. I  gave up on The Forty Year Old Virgin before seeing the hilarious ending a month later by chance.

And don't even think about using a bit torrent client with Max. It shuts down the system every few minutes.  TV and internet is out as soon as you boot up your bit torrent client. I can hear the main SaskTel Max box clicking and resetting every few minutes. This means none of my computers can talk to each other during this time, the TV goes out, and we have no internet connection. Bit torrent is the future of legal online video distribution (Joost, for example.)

But my main beef with SaskTel Max is picture quality. It was evident from the get-go. I complained and they sent people out.  But it's digital and it's either there or it isn't, and as I've said, it often isn't.  It's not like analogue cable where you might have interference in the line. Digital is on or off.

One of the many troubleshooters I talked to with Max confided to me that the picture is indeed terrible and he doesn't have it in his home because his family watches sports. Ever watch a Rider game on Max?  The camera moves a lot so that means the low data rate looks terrible because every video frame is different than the last. You can't see a thing!

The picture on SaskTel max is horrible. What's worse is it doesn't have to be. Someone at SaskTel decided you were too stupid to notice a low quality picture so they chose to highly compress the digital signal to get more channels out of their system. The result is video that looks like internet video from the late 90s.

Currently all digital tv is compressed into MPEG2 video.  Now, standard DVD movies and encoded in MPEG2 and they look great, right? That's because they chose to use a certain amount of data per second to give it a good quality. However, that old porn clip on your computer is also encoded in MPEG2 and looks horrible because your porn site encoded it to be a small file size to save him money on the download/bandwidth costs. Digital TV doesn't necessarily mean good quality. In fact, video quality is getting worse because of digital systems getting overloaded with the increasing number of channels and bandwidth-hungry HDTV channels. Broadcast TV off a good, clean antenna is FAR, FAR better than any digital signal? Why?  Because it's the same signal that gets drastically compressed into a small digital package. It's like a digital photo that has been zoomed into too far. 

American satellite offers the best picture quality because they give the most amounts of bits and bytes per channel than anyone else. I had that service when it was legal.  But Americans have lots of money and people to justify the extra satellite or two that it takes to have high quality. You really had a hard time distinguishing between a DVD movie and one playing on US pay per view, the quality was that good.  It's not that it used the same data rate as DVDs but it used enough to make it hard to discern the difference.

In Canada, the satellite companies don't have the same economies to work with. They have to compress their channels more and the quality isn't anywhere near that of the US.

Cable companies here also compress but not as much as satellite. They have cables to push their signals through. However, HDTV takes four times the bandwidth (it should be more to have the best quality).  That means everyone who serves TV has to make room for more channels that take up more of their bandwidth. This makes them compress their channels more and more, hoping you the consumer won't notice.

What SaskTel did was decide from their launch that people are stupid and half blind. They chose a very, very low bitrate for their video. On a TV bigger than 26 inches, you see the artifacts and digital blockiness associated with crappy internet video. They chose this bitrate, assuming you wouldn't care. They also assumed three years ago that everyone wouldn't have giant flat screen TVs anytime in the near future. My biggest screen is a 36 inch CRT.  I can't imagine watching this crap on a big screen.

Oh, and  in true telecom fashion, they charge you extra money for onscreen call display. What's the point? Every time the phone rings, the TV and internet go out anyway!

Why do we need a Crown corporation doing this?  I'm all for Crowns when it comes to utilities but not for this. When our one year contract is up, I switching all my services, including phone, to the local cable company.

One week later...

I have the numbers one week after the rat video was posted.

• Total number of people who watched our rat video: 27,000 over both YouTube accounts and all other video sharing sites.
• Total number of Fast Food News views as a series: 34,000 all time
• Highest rank for rat video in its category: #20 for the week

Lessons learned:

• It helps to have a video on a topical matter that people are searching for.  That's what comedian Mark Day does.  He rants about Britney shaving her head so he shows up in searches for people looking for that video. 
• Unlike all other sites that rely on editors to give you exposure, YouTube can work by its community. Submitting your video to a user with a popular video (in the hundreds of thousands of views) can give you exposure.  The user  looks at your video, decides if they like it, if so, they post it as a video response.  They decide who gets to be on their video response box below their video, not the editors.
• Posting comments helps if you have a provocative username. I opened an account that describes the content of my series: FastFoodNewsTV
• Submitting in categories other than comedy is beneficial because there is so much mainstream TV submitted there, user-generated content gets lost quickly.