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From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life

Posted by timothy on Mon Mar 21, 2005 03:03 PM
from the but-then-they'll-have-to-kill-you dept.
Media The Internet
powerline22 writes "From the people who gave you the Internet Archive comes Ourmedia, a place for grassroots media to flourish. Upload anything, maybe a video, some pictures, your custom applescript, and it gets hosted for free, for life. Drupal is hosting the site, and the Internet Archive is providing hosting and bandwidth for the files."
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From Archive.org, Free Multimedia Hosting for Life 50 Comments More /

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  • even copyrighted material? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bdigit (132070) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:05PM (#12003114)
    AWESOME! Screw bittorrent now I can just download everything I need from this site. Porn, music, pirated software. Thanks archive.org!
  • Porn

    Let's be honest here. Your own private permanent porn collection. What could be better?

  • They did this before (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21 2005, @03:05PM (#12003119)

    with their caching idea (like coralcache) but 6months later they stopped it, whats to say the same wont happen here ? when people do hosting they want reliability not bandwidth

  • Yeah baby... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21 2005, @03:05PM (#12003123)
    I mean, what's the better way to stress-test their servers than announce it on slashdot.org?

  • How Long? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bleckywelcky (518520) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:06PM (#12003125)
    How long can this really last? Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Admins need to eat. I think it's a good idea, but just wondering where the funds are going to come from.

    • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xzzy (111297) <sether@[ ]7h.org ['tru' in gap]> on Monday March 21 2005, @03:15PM (#12003244) Homepage
      Even so, to some extent it does need to be done.

      I'm not saying everything (or even a measurable portion) that appears on the internet is worth keeping forever, but the worth of any of it is not something those in the present are qualified to judge on.

      In a thousand years, provided humanity hasn't wiped itself out by then, the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

      • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Funny)

        by eln (21727) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:32PM (#12003440) Homepage
        the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

        Good God, I hope not.

      • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Funny)

        by doormat (63648) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:42PM (#12003559) Journal
        In a thousand years, provided humanity hasn't wiped itself out by then, the internet archive (and by extension, ourmedia.org) will be what archaeologists use to learn about us.

        Yes, because thats what I want to be remembered by, porn, All Your Base..., the star wars kid and NumaNuma. Yea... right...

    • Re:How Long? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Deagol (323173) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:17PM (#12003268) Homepage
      archive.org has been around for quite some time, and they offer no small service. They've obviously secured funding from somewhere.

    • Depends on the economics. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by PxM (855264) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:17PM (#12003273)
      The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.

      --
      Want a free iPod? [freeipods.com]
      Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. [freegamingsystems.com] (you only need 4 referrals)
      Wired article as proof [wired.com]

    • Re:How Long? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ArcticFlood (863255) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:26PM (#12003371)
      This page [archive.org] tells how archive.org obtains its funding.
    • Admins need to eat.

      WHAT!?!!? Oh crap, I left them in the glass room for a month with no food!

      Oh Ghod! The UNIX admins tried to eat the MCSA's brain and starved to death.

      Oh the horror! THE HORROR!!!

  • In the end, lots of homemade stuff (Score:3, Insightful)

    by suso (153703) * on Monday March 21 2005, @03:06PM (#12003130) Homepage Journal
    Cool, sounds like the perfect place to store Rooftop Warrior [suso.org] [warning, bad quality homemade ninja movie]

  • Uh huh (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "For life".

    Think they're going to hold to that?

    And I don't just mean in the case of the 90% of content which will be posted there illegally, or even the 80% of the leftover content which will be highly pornographic. What if I post an MPEG there and it gets linked on fark and winds up eating terrabytes of the site's bandwidth? How long you think it will remain there?

    • Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21 2005, @03:10PM (#12003185)
      "For life"....

      ..."OF OUR COMPANY!!!." Oh shit, I said the quite part loud and the loud part quiet.
  • wow - thats the one drag and limit to working with video online - bandwidth. this could really open up possibilities for video clips and shows for the people by the people..

    the 'permenant for life' thing seems a little wishful, but we'll see.

  • I bet there isn't a catch! (Score:3, Funny)

    by 93,000 (150453) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:07PM (#12003145)
    Things are never too good to be true, especially in the computer world.

  • obl. privacy concern. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21 2005, @03:08PM (#12003149)
    all is well and good, until they get bought by someone else. what happens to the data then? what happens if they go bankrupt, and their hard drives wind up on ebay?
  • "I'm sorry. You can't run this site since it hosts material deemed illegal by our hate-speech laws."

    Free speech ain't always pretty.

  • World's Youngest Video Blogger (Score:5, Insightful)

    by filmmaker (850359) * on Monday March 21 2005, @03:08PM (#12003153) Homepage
    The segment about the "World's Youngest Video Blogger" is amazing. The time to media was a matter of a couple weeks and she goes from her first iMovie lesson from her father to being on ABC's "People of the Year" show.

    It then hit me: she's a "bigger" star online than on the television. Just watching that piece inadvertantly acts as a portent for a time when television is more or less culturally irrelevant, or more to the point, indistinguishable from "web" media.

  • Which life? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21 2005, @03:11PM (#12003203)
    Hopefully "for life" didn't mean the life of their websever, because that was shortened to about 5 minutes after the story was posted. :)

  • Mirror (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcguyver (589810) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:12PM (#12003216)
    In case of a slashdotting, here's a mirror of OurMedia on the wayback machine:
    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ourmedia.o rg [archive.org]

    /ironic

  • Already been using it for 9 months (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Radix37 (670836) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:13PM (#12003222) Homepage
    At my website... it wouldn't exist at the size it is now without archive.

  • GREAT for independent musicians (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Trolling4Columbine (679367) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:16PM (#12003255)
    Now they don't have to buy storage and bandwidth to host their music.

    Not sure what hosting costs your average indy band, but anything that saves them even a few bucks is a boon.

  • Smells like a cheap ploy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ced_Ex (789138) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:22PM (#12003325)
    Given that the site is slashdotted by you hordes, I'm basing from the article posting it seems to me that this could be an easy way to obtain copyrighted material without getting any **AA involvement.

    Here's the plan:

    1. Claim to host multimedia for life.
    2. Open access for users to *upload*
    3. ???
    4. Shut down because of bad business plan.
    5. Reap the rewards!

    Technically you didn't download any files, and by the time *AA comes by, you've shut down and stopped hosting files. (But really we all know you've made those backup copies offline.)

    Am I right, or am I right?

  • Wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pHatidic (163975) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:25PM (#12003356) Homepage
    I see that they are partnered with wikipedia, what exactly is the relationship of this partnership?

  • A little known media archive .. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eloquence (144160) on Monday March 21 2005, @05:18PM (#12004890) Homepage
    .. that everyone will start talking about soon is the Wikimedia Commons [wikimedia.org], which already hosts about 40,000 files (mostly images). All of the content on the Commons is under a free license. What is it? It's the media archive used by the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and Wikinews [wikinews.org]. It's been created in September last year and has been growing at a rapid pace ever since.

    If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects [wikimediafoundation.org], such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service [wikimedia.org], where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.

    Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations [wikimediafoundation.org] from people like you.

  • Coders needed for open source project (Score:5, Informative)

    by aaronsorkin (589236) on Monday March 21 2005, @08:45PM (#12007082)
    I was wondering whether to post this to /. or not.

    What the hell -- we're a free, not-for-profit, open-source media project. It doesn't get more Slashdotty than that.

    We're looking for coders to help out on Ourmedia -- to make it a Slashdotter's multimedia wet dream.

    The Ourmedia Project is relying on open-source developers to build new functionalities for the site -- such as media ratings, new RSS features, playlists, social networking, license searches, improved taxonomies -- and to help build a global registry connecting a network of grassroots media sites.

    That means six months from now we don't want to be just a destination website -- we want open-source schemas that will let any site hook into a global network of freely accessible grassroots media.

    But we can't pull that off unless more expert coders pitch in. (Here's our current project team [ourmedia.org] and advisory board [open-media.org].) (Apologies, we're adding more servers tonight.)

    See our Volunteer page [ourmedia.org] for details. Pass it along. Or ignore this, as you wish. :~) -- jd (email [mailto]), co-founder

    • Re:Repeat after me kids.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nicky_d (92174) on Monday March 21 2005, @04:03PM (#12003837) Homepage

      ..THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "FREE".

      That's a mantra for C21st America if ever I heard one. Of course there's such a thing as 'free'. Yeah, someone pays, but if it ain't me, then it's free. If I end up with two copies of a book and I give one away, I've paid for both but the surplus copy is entirely free to whoever I give it to. If I help a friend out with their PC, I pay with my time, but the service is free to them. Things are sometimes done in kindness, or in the service of a better world, even in this day and age. Don't let 'them' convince you otherwise.

      Of course, free iPod schemes are a different matter, and I'd imagine this kind of cynical appeal to the frugally covetous is what you're talking about. But I don't equate archive.org with the architects of those kind of schemes. It IS still possible to get something good and decent for free, and that's something to be thankful for.

    • Re:If it sounds too good to be true ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by TTK Ciar (698795) on Monday March 21 2005, @04:30PM (#12004173) Homepage Journal

      The Internet Archive has been around since 1996. We're funded by webcrawls-by-contract and by the Brewster Kahle Foundation. The Archive is a non-profit organization. We have no creditors. So relax.

      It is in our charter to perpetuate our archives forever, and it's a charge we take seriously. As our hard drives go bad (and oh do they ever!) they are replaced by new ones, and we are protected from data loss by mirroring our archives across machines, and across data centers in different countries.

      -- TTK

      • What I posted was only half the story .. in full, the Archive gets its funding the same way that traditional libraries do, through grants from foundations, donations from private entities, and in-kind donations from corporations. The K/A Foundation and crawls-by-contract are just the sources of income with which I am most familiar (I'm just a dumb-ass programmer, so that part of the business isn't very visible to me, thus the oversight).

        -- TTK

        • Well, the UI (the page linked to by slashdot here) isn't hosted at The Archive, for better or for worse.

          The non-waybackmachine web servers (ten, at present) at archive.org proper are load-balanced via keepalived, and should stand up okay before a slashdotting. We learned things about the limitations of our webfarm from hosting the tsunami videos in the wake of that disaster, and beefed them up significantly.

          Non-waybackmachine web traffic usually hovers around 40 to 60 hits per second, here, and we sho

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