If you’ve ever thought about starting your own YouTube, MetaCafe, or Break.com, you’ll need a decent video sharing script. There are a ton of commercial options out there, but your choices seem to dwindle significantly if you want one for free. ClipBucket is an open source video sharing site I found while Googling and the first thing I noticed is that it has a really cool looking demo. I love when sites make it easy on you and provide a great demo.

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Unfortunately that’s all I found over at ClipBucket. They seem to be in the process of updating their site so the additional information I was looking for was not available. I was perusing the site in search of a simple feature list but there isn’t one to be found. There was only a few FAQ’s, the “About” page was broken, and even the documentation appeared rather thin. I was hoping for an administration (backend) demo too, but I could only find a front end demo.

In defense of ClipBucket, they do have a notice on their front page that they are updating the site and there might be some dead ends. When I checked out the documentation, my first thought was that this was fairly new software, but the site copyright goes back to 2007. I think if they beefed up those help docs, more hacks like me would be willing to give it a try. One of their revenue streams comes from the sale of themes and plugins so I would think the easier it is for the laymen to find helpful information about the software, the more users (and money) would come their way.

On the other hand, if you have a decent product that is in high demand, you will attract people regardless. It appears that ClipBucket has no shortage of users so they must be doing something right. I wish the showcase was up so I could have a look at what people have done with it. As I mentioned before, the demo looks great, but it’s also nice to see how others have customized the script to make it their own.

I think I’ll make a note to check back on ClipBucket because it looks promising. I love the idea of starting a niche video sharing site, but the commercial software prices can run pretty high for this kind of script. If anyone is using ClipBucket or has some opinions on the software, I’d be interested in hearing what you think.

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