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This would be cool @jordan. If we want to share a tip on how to hit he ball a certain way we could do that with a short 30 second video.
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You done opened up a fresh can o’ worms @Talyn 
because video is complex…
and video in the cloud is even more complex…
But I’m glad you started a discussion about it. I’ll do my best to lay out some fun facts.
I love the example you gave, Paul. We will definitely be doing a LOT of that, in these forums. We just need to talk about the best way to do that.
tl;dr - video hosting here would be expensive and subpar BUT we do have a solution that provides the BEST viewing expeirence for community guests and members.
︎ that is worm color… since you opened up the can.
NOW, here’s my treatise about online video:
We’re spoiled by the exceptional video content and quality that exists all over the web, in almost every video that we see. We’ve had our expectations of video experience modeled for us from the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, and AppleTV on our TVs (and now phones), and also from Youtube, Facebook, and Vimeo, on our computers (and now phones).
The one thing that each of these companies/services have in common? Market cap 
At the time of this geeking out session, here are the estimated valuation of these companies:
- Apple ~$1.31T
- Amazon: $972.70B
- YouTube (Alphabet/Google): ~$900B
- Facebook ~$559.94B
- Netflix ~$167.21B
- Hulu ~$27.5B
- Vimeo ~$20B
And as you know, them B’s mean “Bajillion”! And that “T” is just insane 
That was a fun exercise, right?! Sorry, @Talyn and @SirPaul… I like geeking out on stuff like this.
Why is all of that relevant? Well, each of these companies have enough funding to provide the absolute best video consumption experience that exists on any platform. And one thing each of these companies do with that money is; invest in making video players that are second to absolutely none.
The technology that goes into these video players is unreal.
Do you remember the early days of online video? Even the early days of YouTube. The younger generation has probably never even heard the word “buffering” but those of us born before 1990 remember the early days of online video. 
It was almost as bad as that dreadful sound we had to hear as we waited for our “dial-up” internet to get us logged on to Netscape Navigator or AOL.
We’ve come a long way. But the companies that have come the farthest, in terms of technology, are the ones who have built billion+ dollar companies.
Another lil company whose sole business is running online forums (similar to Pickleballist forums), which you may have heard of, called Reddit, is probably valued ~3B atm.
Reddit started back in 2005, and it wasn’t until 12 years later - August of 2017 - that they finally added native video hosting capabilities to their service.
So what about all of this data?
Well the point is that we could do video hosting directly here in these forums. I’m personally funding this project with savings and a whole lot of time and tlc. So money is one reason that we’re not able to allow video uploads at the present.
But know this… money is not the main issue here. Even if I was independently wealthy I’m not sure I would want to host the video here on these forums. Why?
Consider these two points:
- Best experience for members who upload content would be to do so in this application.
- Best experience for viewers would be to watch video, leveraging the best tech on the web.
The video player that we could use here, is not the best tech on the web. And we want to allow the folks who watch your video content to have an exceptional and flawless experience, when they press play. They’ll thank you for it… with a warm smile… which you may never see… but it will happen!
The bottom line is that these other, best in class, video players are able to encode video at different sizes for different devices. There are hundreds or even thousands of different types of devices accessing the interwebs. These best in class players also have adaptive bitrate streaming, as well as immediate streaming and cloud processing. 
This blows my mind just thinking about it.
So to summarize:
Video is hard.
But we feel like our decision to encourage forum members to use best in class video players, is the right one for our community. The embedding capability of external content is superb. (see below)
And here’s the great news…
Embedding external videos here in these forums works like a charm! We leverage the extremely high-tech web video-players that these other platforms dumped millions of R&D into, for this very specific purpose… so that their video content can be embedded in other places… like these forums!
I hope that this was a helpful explanation on why we’re using video player embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and other high tech html5 players.
Now, for your viewing pleasure, here are a few samples of embedded videos from best in class players:
Youtube
Vimeo
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Thanks for the explanation. As a new commentator in the sport that sometimes has to manage his own software/hardware and sharing, I appreciate the information.
Thanks Brandon! There’s def a lot to this conversation.
I hope to see you get some more commentating gigs in the near future! I can’t believe you pulled off what you did at the Hawaii open, with your own cell phone! 
You really can’t get better than the Youtube player. It’s top of the line for a free service. Annnnd if we get more pickleball players posting vids there, as the main source for video content, we help supply the second largest search engine in the world (YouTube) with pickleball content!
#letsgrowpickleball
What other forum is going to give you that level of an answer?
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Hahah! Well @thezone.tv, I always like to know the “why” behind things. I enjoy taking the time to make sure I understand the “Why” as well. Sometimes when you know a thing, you make a decision based on that knowledge, right? But then to articulate it to others is a whole different story!
Docendo Discimus!
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