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GuyMan20

skydivingmovies.com

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When you upload a video - you have the option to allow embedding or not - if you select no - then the video cant be used on another site - also stops the other sites using my bandwidth.
www.justskydivers.com - Drop into the online DZ!
www.justskydivingmovies.com

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It's a nice system that you found to run it but it's the same thing everyone else is done. If you really want to get people on board, it needs to be extremely similiar to the original.
There is something about it that just draws me to the site watching higher quality videos. If you read all the threads on this topic, a lot of people mentioned they are not crazy about the flash streaming version of everything and we miss the file based site.

Fund that and you'd be a saint I'm sure haha.
Just giving my input because I am an old hardcore member and it's not quite on the nose of what we were trying to bring back.

I appreciate the efforts thus far..
blue skyz
cbkyro
http://www.FuelYourEdge.com

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Yup, I agree as others have said. The original skydivingmovies.com just had a simplicity to it that made it work. Upload high quality files, categorise them, let everyone download those same high quality files, and then you have the file on your computer to watch whenever you want.

I honestly dont like the idea of having to stream videos everytime I want to watch something.

It's great to see people trying to make a good solution though. Keep up the good work.

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I like the idea of having both the original and the convenient streamed Flash video available on a site. With the appropriate browser add-ins, I can download Flash videos from most websites, and if a site were designed to easily allow downloads, that would work even better.

I put some of my videos on a video site (blip.tv) where one can watch (and thus download with the right software) either the flash conversion, or the original high quality video.

I did like the way skydivingmovies tried to make people provide detailed descriptions in various categories, for every movie uploaded. A good description is in a sense far better than even Flash -- it makes it easy to look through lists and search for certain content, without even having to download Flash videos and see what you got.

There was a certain technical quality and intellectual honesty of having detailed descriptions, that made skydivingmovies a real resource.

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Does anyone have contact details for the owner of skydiving movies then - i'd be interested in contacting him to see if we could do a deal regarding getting it back online.



Pilotdave
"There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy

"~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

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Craig Poxon I believe is the actual owner or holder of the url skydivingmovies.com

To save you some time, you're not going to be able to get his attention. I've done everything short of calling or going to his house. I believe it was in the UK. (Found through public information)
Of course no one wants to give it up but they would rather hang on to it instead of "sharing" or letting someone do a site and they still kept the name. There are numerous ways to go about it to where they lose nothing and our community gains everything back.
But instead we're stuck here having withdraws and the people who could give us our fix are being stubborn.
blue skyz
cbkyro
http://www.FuelYourEdge.com

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i couldn't agree with you more! I know pilotdave has spoken about getting it back online but nothing is coming of it!

There are plenty of people on here who are more than willing to help get it back online!

Why isnt Dave taking this on board and using the services fellow skydivers are offering!

It looks like people are being kinda stubborn here, after all who owns all the footage? Skydiving movies is made up from all of our media! SDM would be nothing with out us!

Stop hogging it and let the community have it back. There's plenty of people willing to work with you to sort it out!

Actions speak louder than words!!
"You only live once"

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Craig helped me in one of the Perris big ways (Men's World Record)

What I heard indirectly, is that SkydivingMovies cost thousands to operate and ran at a pretty major considerable loss. If someone wants to bankroll a few thousand dollars, or volunteer many hours uploading videos (intact, with descriptions) to some kind of a SkydivingMovies YouTube Channel. Plus time & money spent transferring gigabytes of archived video data, which may now be incomplete and disorganized, now that the website no longer exists.

It may be that someone needs to step up and pay for somebody's time (i.e. a few hundred dollars) to even bother to get this work started because somebody has kids and cannot take time off work to pull out an old backup, copy it to media or additional hard disk that costs money, and send it off to an unproven volunteer who might just 'sit' on it. (It has happened many times before). What is needed is the right mix of platinum-reputation volunteer resources, financial resources, and/or website+coding resources. Show your 'stuff' (not just significant money, but also programming skill, volunteer time, etc/). It may be that at this time, just offering hosting services just won't cut it anymore.

There's considerable time-effort to produce a replacement volunteer group, is quite difficult, including the transfer of content, operations, privacy trust, liability issues, hosting stability, programming skill for a custom site -- Even the shoestring approach of converting to sometihng more standardized such as a SkydivingMovies YouTube channel, and creating a skdyvingmovies website with embedded YouTube videos to save on bandwidth costs -- even this shoestring approach still requires considerable volunteer time, too. Or even if keeping the existing scripts/site/etc, and finding a compatible hosting service, there's inertia restarting. Once the site ground to a halt, there is now a new surge of volunteer time necessary to get momentum back up (i.e. transfer to new hosting service, new volunteers, etc) And that time/money may just 'not' be there.

Remember, we're talking about people with a job and family buddy... That are reluctant to return to working on a losing endeavour (lost time that takes away from family, takes away from job, takes away from skydiving -- even if free hosting is offered).

Thus, it will take a massively up-stepped approach to resume skydivingmovies -- far beyond just offering free hosting service. For example, even a sudden unsolicited 3-digit or low 4-digit PayPal donation may not be enough; someone may also need to donate computer-geek time simultaneously too, with that. Someone just needs to find out what the 'price' is.

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Glad you've jumped in the mix here.
It's late and at the moment I simply don't feel like looking up all my old posts but in short, I took the time to speak with my host provider and a professional high end provider about what it takes for our file based and streaming based website.

Everyone and their jumpmaster has thrown up and streaming based site. It's nice but just not what everyone grew to love. I spent time on the phone getting exact numbers to host a file based website with a company specializing in that amount of bandwidth. Not to mention even set up an account (not affiliate but the term they use just left me) that gets me the cost of what is needed cut by HALF.
The way I see it is if no one wants to pay the funds monthly themselves then a publicy viewable donation pool on the site is more appropriate if we want to leave advertisements out of the equation.
If I recall, there were some scrolling ads at the top of the former skydivingmovies.com which I ACTUALLY used. I don't know why those few couldn't cover the cost.

If you would like more detail on this I will dig up the info again and get us some more numbers. I believe I quoted somewhere around 5,000 - 10,000 hits a day just to be safe and with my account it was somewhere around $45 a month. It just really depends on which option was taken.

Toss in your two cents.
blue skyz
cbkyro
http://www.FuelYourEdge.com

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If you would like more detail on this I will dig up the info again and get us some more numbers. I believe I quoted somewhere around 5,000 - 10,000 hits a day just to be safe and with my account it was somewhere around $45 a month. It just really depends on which option was taken. Toss in your two cents.

Is that 5,000 to 10,000 actual video transfers per day? Or standard web page hits? Popular videos can spike to over a million if it goes suddenly "viral", although that more often happens with YouTube. The cost can be quite unpredictable, and the hosting service sometimes have to come back and ask for the upgraded service.

Someone does need to ask the original owner how much it cost, but at full price, it can cost well over $100 per month especially if traffic more than doubles, and that's over a grand per year. If it spikes in popularity, hosting service comes calling and forces you to leave or upgrade your plan. (I believe that's part of what happened with Skydiving Movies, earlier?)

One alternate method is to make it a wrapper for a Skydivingmovies YouTube channel, meaning it becomes a website that has embedded videos using other servers for the video (i.e. YouTube). That would essentially be free bandwidth. That said, it would have to be more attractive to skydivers than just uploading directly to YouTube.

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Where I am at right now for my hosting for other non-related projects, a 100MB video watched 1000 times a day every day for a whole month costs about $242 + storage costs at $0.55 a GB monthly. This is on a content provider that can do full speed to essentially as many people could possibly hit the site and could care less if a video got 100,000 hits.

But all that doesn't mean anything because we have no concept of what kind of ad revenue the site was generating.

I think the problem we have had so far is that it's hard to get something up and started now because when skydivingmovies.com started it was the _only_ site that was worth going to. Now things are pretty fractured and it's hard to get everybody behind anything. And who wants to pay for this services when youtube is out there for free? No one wants to deal with trying to rebuild that content base.

All that stuff is out there in limbo, kinda makes it hard to start over for a lot of people I think.
~D
Where troubles melt like lemon drops Away above the chimney tops That's where you'll find me.
Swooping is taking one last poke at the bear before escaping it's cave - davelepka

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I don't know much about what the costs would have been. I didn't have access to server logs when the site was up, so I don't know what the server was doing in terms of bandwidth and throughput.

The server host would have charged over $1000/month for the service if it wasn't donated. Don't know exactly how much, but that's what they charged for a dedicated server.

Ad revenue was basically nothing. Didn't put a dent in covering costs.

It'll be back in one form or another at some point.

Dave

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How much storage were you up to?

I know a guy that might be able to hook us up somehow.
"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

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I used to work with a guy, and still doing consulting with him.

He opened up his own web hosting company, and now has grown pretty large. I cant promise we can get a hell of a deal, but hes pretty cool and might hook us up. I'm one of the reasons his company has been successful.
"I may be a dirty pirate hooker...but I'm not about to go stand on the corner." iluvtofly
DPH -7, TDS 578, Muff 5153, SCR 14890
I'm an asshole, and I approve this message

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Did you administer the old site? And if so, are you still willing to administer it again if a hosting solution can be found?

The bandwidth usage is still the BIG missing piece of the puzzle though. Any estimates you can come up with would really be helpful.

I work with people who operate websites with millions of dollars per year in revenue. They don't seem to think skydivingmovies.com could ever be a money maker, but they're interested in hearing details anyway, and might be willing to help with something I have a passion for. I understand that you don't have web stats to give us, but please give us as much info as you can.

I really miss the site! :(

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well i can do you a dedicated server - with lets say 500GB storage to start, 100mbit connection, 1TB bandwidth, 4gb ram etc for about the £60 a month mark. If you require a control panel - eg directadmin, cpanel or plesk thats extra.
www.justskydivers.com - Drop into the online DZ!
www.justskydivingmovies.com

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If you would like more detail on this I will dig up the info again and get us some more numbers. I believe I quoted somewhere around 5,000 - 10,000 hits a day just to be safe and with my account it was somewhere around $45 a month. It just really depends on which option was taken. Toss in your two cents.

Is that 5,000 to 10,000 actual video transfers per day? Or standard web page hits? Popular videos can spike to over a million if it goes suddenly "viral", although that more often happens with YouTube. The cost can be quite unpredictable, and the hosting service sometimes have to come back and ask for the upgraded service.

Someone does need to ask the original owner how much it cost, but at full price, it can cost well over $100 per month especially if traffic more than doubles, and that's over a grand per year. If it spikes in popularity, hosting service comes calling and forces you to leave or upgrade your plan. (I believe that's part of what happened with Skydiving Movies, earlier?)

One alternate method is to make it a wrapper for a Skydivingmovies YouTube channel, meaning it becomes a website that has embedded videos using other servers for the video (i.e. YouTube). That would essentially be free bandwidth. That said, it would have to be more attractive to skydivers than just uploading directly to YouTube.



Well I said "hits" here but in our conversation I implied hits and transfers. I'm aware it would be over $100 a month but I got in with him on affiliate info and such and he put me in to work for them by selling their services and etc.. Was just a different way than what I normally do. But that's how come the cost was drastically dropped.
blue skyz
cbkyro
http://www.FuelYourEdge.com

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