While YouTube tries to figure out whether or not I’m a criminal for uploading a kids’ dance recital using commercial music, here is one attempt to share it with others!

Update! I finally have a version on YouTube that isn’t blocked; it has some songs muted, but if you struggle to play the versions on this post, go check out https://youtu.be/5V6oaZ8jnT0

Note – this is not like YouTube; if your internet isn’t fast enough, it just won’t work (i.e. don’t try to do this on mobile). The regular quality version is 6GB for a 2-hour show which translates to about 7mbps internet required to watch this. If you have troubles or just want to download either version, use one of the following links:

• 1080p version – low bitrate (5.7GB)
• 1080p version – high bitrate (17GB)

(One more caveat / apology – someone bumped the camera before act 2 while I was on-stage; I’m so sorry for the couple of dancers who got cut off!)

Regular Quality (7Mbps Internet Required)

High Quality (21Mbps Internet Required)

Three of my kids and I (yes, I, too) were in a dance recital this last Saturday. With my fancy new Galaxy S22Ultra, I recorded the whole thing in 4k on a tripod and told a few people that I was planning on sharing it on the studio’s Facebook page. Unfortunately that’s seeming less and less possible.

Last year, after livestreaming the recital when it was at a smaller theater, I learned that Facebook is aggressive and will just mute your stream if it detects any copyrighted material. I’ve shared several things to YouTube, though, and only received demonitization strikes (as if I’m actually making any money on these things), so I figured that’d be a better route this year.

After several hours of editing and encoding the 2 hour recital, I was ready to upload to YouTube. a 45-gig source file was no trouble for my municipal fiber connection, and it uploaded in just a few minutes. But then the strikes started rolling in.

First the typical “demonitization” strikes. Oh, no! The 10-20 views this video will ever see won’t earn me any fractions of pennies. But then I was notified that the video would be blocked in some countries. After checking, I discovered that no Russians could see the recital, which seems to be a restriction I can live with. But then came the heavy hammer. 7 of the strikes caused the entire video to be blocked throughout all of YouTube.

70 different copyright holders are fine with a kids’ dance recital being on YouTube and just extracting the pennies in ad revenue it’ll produce. 7 want to break kids (and this daddy’s) hearts. Look, I get that artists and publishers are entitled to compensation for their work. But being able to share home video of a dance recital with your friends shouldn’t require a team of lawyers, fancy audio manipulation, or complicated manual work-arounds.

In the meantime, I have the original file (and some lighter-weight encodes as I produce them) available at https://flessnerfam.com/danceRecital/ Additionally, it seems like YouTube will let me just mute the “offending” portions, but each one requires re-processing the video… which takes several hours. So maybe in a week, it’ll be available…. with 7 randomly scattered silences.

(P.S. I also wanted to share the original Bobby Fischer skit, but good luck ever finding SNL clips on YouTube that aren’t immediately taken down for similar reasons. I guess they figure their DVD sales…or these days Peacock Premium subscriptions…actually draw more revenue than the millions of views some of these sketches would pull on YouTube…. well, they didn’t get any revenue from me)

If there’s one thing I detest about blogs, especially startup blogs, is how often posts are about blogging, how the blogger is blogging, what sorts of things the blogger wants to blog about, and why the blogger hasn’t been blogging as much as they wanted to in the past. Blargh!

So in this post, I’m going to talk about my blogging.

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