Interface

The common thread between most of these sites is that they are user-based. All content must be uploaded by users, and in order to upload you must sign up to be a member of the respective internet video site. Membership is largely free, which is astounding when you think of how even a few years ago you would need to pay a fee for server space to host your content. Now you can have unlimited space to host all of your videos (though the quality of the video-compression may be an issue).

Each video gets its own separate page that looks like this:

To encourage the user experience and community, there's a space for comments responding to the video (often marred by inappropriateness and inanity: the touchstones of the internet). Users can rate the videos anywhere from one to five stars, add them to their list of favorite videos, send them to someone through a form email or add them to a personal video playlist. There's also a space that displays videos from other users that may have related content and a dropdown menu to see more videos from the same user. There are options to upload a response video, which can be seen as the next step up from leaving a comment (or just a way for people to garner some extra hits from a popular video).


Some internet video sites other than YouTube run ads within the video screen before and during videos. Funny that we have yet to escape the ad-as-interruption.