After Hours: Now With Video!

I'm finally getting video back onto the site, and hopefully I can explain why some visitors won't be able to view them.

For the benefit of those who have not faithfully followed After Hours since the beginning, I should mention that in nearly every incarnation of this site there have been videos available for your viewing pleasure… until this one.  As the site grew in the early years, so did my concern regarding my hosting of copyrighted content.  You see, while I am somehow endowed with the ability to put pictures and video together on the screen in compelling ways, I am not so gifted in the music department.  I feel I am able to work with music well, yet I have never composed anything worth listening to that’s longer than eight seconds.  Since video is nearly useless without audio, and since musical audio can augment the storytelling of motion pictures, I use other people’s music.

In all likelihood, it was illegal for me to post my videos that used other’s music for all to watch.  I say in all likelihood because no one seems to know for certain and the record labels don’t seem to care a whole lot about the myriad of videos up on YouTube that are edited to commercial music.  Nonetheless, I attempted to acquire licenses for the music used in my videos that I was planning on hosting on this site.  Attempted and failed.  Few people in the industry would even talk to me, and those that did didn’t sound like they had ever heard such requests.  The one person that did offer me any kind of ballpark figure estimated the costs to be around $2,000 per track.  Minimum.

Plan B.  My new site has membership capabilities built-in.  The original intent was to allow friends and family members privileged access to my contact information.  With the music licensing developments, I decided to further take advantage of this capability.  Since copyright law allows for fair use, I’ve decided to only allow my videos to be seen by friends and family members on the site.  Basically, anyone I’d show the video to in my home (which falls under fair use) gets to check it out on the website.  Random people who stumble across my website are, unfortunately, out of luck.

A few more details for you before I send you off to the races; I figure you might want to know how to gain access and such.  First of all, when anyone registers at this site I am notified by email.  If it is a friend or family member, I upgrade their account at my earliest convenience.  It’s that simple.  After that, so long as they check the “auto-login on future visits” checkbox on the login page and never log out, there will be no hassle involved with being a member of the site.  Except if they want to view from another computer or something; in such cases password recovery is automated and rather painless.

So, if you’re already a member and you are my friend or my family, head on over to the videos section of the website and check it out.  If not, register today so that you can join in on the fun.  If you’re a friend or family member, you can expect your account to be upgraded within a day or so.