With the upcoming Monkey I’m confident enough to switch to the DuckDuckGo video search by default, which is a strong move from the Youtube default. It means I’m assuming you’ll be able to play most of what DuckDuckGo suggest. Sure you might stumble upon unsupported facebook video (which I might add in the future) or MSN content. But I’m assuming you’ll have enough ressource to find the exact alternative with the integrated backends.
It means I’m closing up with the original vision to build a video player for a post platform era. Essentially pushing the paradigm further than “browser embedded” based services. VBML and VideoTags are a glimpse of what a post video platform era might look like. Naturally, video services and “platforms” will continue to play an important role given the strong corporate players behind them. But I feel they’ll be more and more viewed as hosting services.
Next, I’ll be working on “discovery” aka “recommend” + “show what’s new” for the next monkey release. My goal is to uninstall the Youtube application from my smartphone after that. Relying a 100% on Monkey + occasional chrome for community aspects surrounding a video.
After this, I’m essentially done with the project. The vision is complete. Sure, one could suggest adding AI support or whatever. But that’s not part of the original vision and one should stick to what was carefuly planned originally. I currently have ~650 active user on the Android version alone. I do not know if the upcoming updates will gain me any traction. But I have no control over this. I just want to finish the job, communicate about it and move on.
Benjamin Arnaud