Youtube.
Actually, a great many of the missing videos are due to youtube's banning of users who put up content that Icenetwork or whomever complained about.
When the user tripleaxel was banned, all of his/her videos, whether they were part of the complaint or not, disappeared, for example. This is true of several other big time youtubers who specialized in figure skating. Get a complaint about 2 or 3 of your vids, and poof, they are all gone, even the films of your little dog and your cute kids.
I'm going through my Previews and updating program links to replace dead links due to the banning. While all the Fraser/Lukanin links were broken and many of the Rubleva Shefer links, I only lost a couple others in the recent Ice Dance TEBC preview. BTW, I have now replaced the R/S & F/L links with valid links again. I doubt that the powers that be were particularly targeting the 3rd or 4th place Russians or the team from Azerbaijan. However, the youtuber who liked them as well as some bigger names got banned, and now it's all gone.
BTW, I don't use US links, in general. I use Canadian TV, Russian TV and Eurosport, if I can get it. CBC posts vids of its broadcasts on its own website and if they left them up longer, I'd use them more often. And Eurosport is available on line, as is CN8 and Orange and Daum. In general companies that are airing internet content for free are not complaining to youtube.
The issue isn't that the owner's of the content are complaining. The issue is that Icenetwork wants youtube to restrict certain videos from being shown in the US. And youtube doesn't really have that ability, so if you have anything at all bad, it just bans you, snip, snap, snup.
BTW, Japanese media area as likely to lodge TOS complaints as any other group. It's not all US TV or icenetwork.
It appears that someone has a job finding forbidden links at youtube. However, they are not very good at that job. They appear to search on well known US skaters or the phrase Skate America. Consequently, performances by skaters from other countries are easy to find, but there are relatively few vids for US skaters.
So if you find a broken link in a post of yours, just edit and replace.
BTW, if you are trying to find something on youtube, use the advanced search feature. It allows you to select videos uploaded within a range of time. Then use the names of a competitor in the event you are looking for. The odder the name and the more prominent the skater, the better. Then look at all the other uploads by that youtuber and that's where you'll find the rest of the event.
Then subscribe to that youtuber's videos. Chances are they will upload the next event you're interested in, or the next performance the skater they are interested in, either way.
Limiting access to just friends doesn't work. The existence of the video is still revealed on a search, just the average user can't view it.
Erratic spelling is not too useful-the people who want to find the info won't find it. Nor is Cyrillic spelling. Google does the transliteration just fine. Chinese or Korean characters are more safe. (It's darn hard finding either Chinese or Korean vids unless you just stumble on them).
My advice is to just use the names of the competitors and only upload US skaters if the performance is from an event like Liberty, which has a liberal camera policy. Or just upload to dailymotion instead of youtube. Youtube is well integrated into google, and a search will always preferentially find a youtube vid. Unfortunately, that makes it harder to find stuff on dailymotion than on youtube, but that's the price you pay.
:yes::agree:
