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Oh boy. BenMullin/1156313421366923264Permalink On twitter.com
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If I too had to quickly switch video players, I'd probably also go to jwplayer with the intention of immediately switching to something else. They are large & can handle it quickly while one can scope out alternatives. But also expensive and error prone enough to want to get off.Permalink On twitter.com
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But it is very easy to build and launch player agnostic analytics. It's very useful to have for negotiating purposes as well. I'm not sure I'd roll my own player though, especially if - for some god awful reason - video is becoming a primary part of editorial output...Permalink On twitter.com
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I *have* rolled my own player in past gigs and there are times you want to do that. HTML native video is pretty mature right now. It makes a lot of sense at medium to small scale where you don't want to lose any profits to player costs. But technical issues occur at upper scale.Permalink On twitter.com
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If they were planning to sell Kinja... it makes sense. But it doesn't look like that is planned and if you are maintaining your own CMS and the pivot to video is fairly unproven from a revenue perspective... 3rd party might be better. Your engineers prob have other stuff to do?Permalink On twitter.com
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I don't know, since I don't have a lot of insight into the size and status of G/O Eng. Perhaps they're all sitting around w/nothing to do... but that seems doubtful. Maintaining one's own CMS is regular work. Even maintaining a decently modded up WordPress site is a lot of work.Permalink On twitter.com
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And there is the perpetual cycle of keeping up to date with whatever crap the platforms throw your way, SEO specs, ad tech upkeep, etc... that could keep ~two engineers busy full time forever, even if they did nothing but keep up. More when you have your own CMS.Permalink On twitter.com
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What I'm getting at here is: rolling your own video player and support infrastructure is sometimes a good idea! It is easier than it ever has been, but it still is hard and takes work. It is about measuring the situation and considering resources, like any engineering decision.Permalink On twitter.com
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Just managing the technical requirements of VAST/VPAID alone for handling preroll on a player is an immense amount of work to start from scratch, especially if you don't have an expert(s) who sees all the pitfalls.Permalink On twitter.com
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To put this in perspective: even Facebook screwed up their player. And YouTube doesn't allow ad tags like VPAID & VAST<4 that publishers almost all support. Anyway, just reading about this triggered my engineer brain on this decision, b/c I've jumped these hoops before.Permalink On twitter.com
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The main consideration is: if you are going to pivot to video... does it make sense to pivot engineering to video? Like right away? Perhaps... see if the pivot delivers first? I dunno, seems like a good idea. Since historically... it hasn't.On twitter.com
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