The Cloud. Nature made it. Humans imagined shapes for centuries and wondered what it would be like to have the Godly powers to make clouds of our own. Now in the 21st century, we are those Gods, we can make clouds. Albeit digital ones, but still, now on our little Earth there are two types of clouds and it’s way better, this thing called life, is it not? Even Google got into the game and offers Google Drive as a cloud storage solution. With it we can put any types of files and then access them from anywhere, anytime, with anything. Any, any, any, it’s a thing, and I love it. But with it come a few pitfalls, such as, if I can, so might you be able to. This is the security component, and yet it’s not that simple. Accessing clouds in the sky requires an airplane, and those are not cheap, and neither is the knowledge to hack a cloud. So it’s okay, sorta.
Then there’s YouTube, Google’s video streaming service. All You ends up being is a little list of metadata coupled with Google Drive storage for video files. Think of it like a shelf of books on your local library branch’s offerings. Not all books are there, are they? Someone chooses them. Similarly when you visit the homepage of You, someone else chose the videos - even though they claim it was your choices, it really was not. And it’s never quite what you wish to watch, is it? Like right now I’m streaming Seal, but his music never once appears on my YouTube homepage. That’s because a computer does not know what a human wants, it never will, ever, because neither does my girlfriend, nor my other girlfriend. But the simplicity of YouTube is fabulous. I simply upload a video, and anyone in the world may watch it - but not download it - that requires an airplane of sorts, or maybe a balloon such as a Firefox plugin, which many believe it or not still do not know how to attach to the feisty furry kitten. But what is missing from these two things?
It’s the one small thing that’s missing. Google can introduce it silently and make it very intuitive if they chose to. At least for me it would be a life saver. Google Drive gives us a few gigs of storage for free and for a tiny fee, which is understandable as CDN’s (content delivery networks) are not easy nor cheap to operate, one can get much more storage capacity. I upload YouTube videos in full quality, and that is gigs of data sent to the cloud. If I wanted to preserve these videos, as YouTube processes them, I’d have to re-upload the gigs of data onto Google Drive again, and that is quite wasteful. At least for us in Toronto, as we pay by the byte to access, unlike in the ‘90s when Internet was cool and unlimited was really unlimited.
The simple solution is as follows. Provide YouTube video access from Google Drive in full quality as just another folder so I may download them. Whenever I log into Google Drive, there should be a YouTube folder. In it, each channel can have a sub folder. Within these are all the videos with their current titles as filenames or original filenames as I uploaded them. They would be read only and streamable. This way, if I wanted the original files for whatever purposes I needed them for, I could access them. That way when anyone’s on the road, they don’t have to worry if they have full quality offliners for whatever they’re editing. If it’s already on your cloud Google, let it be on our cloud, too. It wouldn’t alter a single thing on the YouTube side in terms of functionality, nor in Google Drive side at all. In fact, it could just be a simple option in Drive settings such as “Enable YouTube access?”. Off by default, and thusly you have given the people a choice and not dictated things. I also don’t see how this option could possibly be exploited nor hurt the user. If on the back end Google does not store original footage after processing, this, too, can be an option of “Store original footage after processing?” and if it’s too space costly the user can pay for it if they so choose. After all, a 10GB file requires way more space than its processed 500MB streamer.
Truly a simple solution and truly maddening how much time it would save us all in some scenarios. Coding it would not require more than a day’s worth of effort for a serious coder I think. Either way thank you Google for YouTube.
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