I would NEVER buy a screencast, tutorial, or anything on web development without knowing EXACTLY when it was last updated. For example, the paid Ember screencasts claim to go over the Ember router - how do I know whether it was the old beta router, the RC1 router, or the RC6 "Promise-ified" router?

Sadly that's exactly why the last updated date usually isn't listed.

I personally hate trying to learn things from videos. I can't search it. I can't copy and paste code from it. I can't skim over it. Later review and skimming ahead is lousy, at best, impossible at worst.

The only thing screencasts have going for them is that they are (in general) easier to create than a well written article. The difference for readers/viewers though is substantial.

Also, video can be a powerful tool. The combination of seeing a thing or a process, hearing a narration about it, and observing another human being interact with it, provides more bandwidth across a wider spectrum of our senses. For some people, it is easier and faster to learn this way, in the same way that it is easier to learn from a tutor than from a textbook.

But that's besides the point. In general, you're right. A lot of screencasts out there suck. And as you clearly exemplify, a lot of people learn better from text than video. Which is precisely why screencasts need their own platform independent from a pure video hosting service like YouTube.

We support full Github-style markdown and code syntax highlighting, and we encourage all content producers to pair their videos with annotations that are sufficient enough to stand alone (similar to what Ryan Bates does with Railscasts/AsciiCasts). And we think that a unified platform which sets that standard will help make it the norm rather than an exception.

[1] http://teamtreehouse.com/

-The color scheme: http://bluetide.pro/DWYp/5BcKpQnl

-The hexagon cut for images/icons: http://bluetide.pro/VZYM/3VbvSuxF , but then using circles for avatars: http://bluetide.pro/LOFC/4Np9xUmq

-The wide button styles: http://bluetide.pro/yzft/L49wdKTr

And yes, these are common things in general, but I think they stick out more to me because the products are in the same realm.

Just some food for thought! :)

EDIT: And don't get me wrong, I don't mean this in a bad way. It's just something to be aware of that I noticed. I really like the idea of the product, in general! Good luck with it! :)

http://i.imgur.com/cxWcz4n.png

GET https://data.sublimevideo.net/js/kcvkz080-beta.js 404 (Not Found)

This makes it quite hard to watch the videos.

Oh and it seems the favicon has an odd white background :-?

Other than that, the site looks extremely sleek :)

We're always looking to optimize our front page though, so we'll absolutely take your feedback into consideration.

What's your reasoning, and how you plan on differentiating yourself for content creators from, say, a YouTube Partner network?

No particular reason - all four of us are web developers, and we quite simply, we each badly wanted a platform for web development screencasts to exist.

We differentiate ourself from YT in a few big ways. The first is our focus on developers. A YT Partner can post videos exclusively on development, but it's obviously impossible to include code markdown or have meaningful software-related tags. We also feature the ability to offer both free and paid videos; it takes a lot of time to make quality screencasts, and many of the developers we've spoken to have found YT insufficient for monetizing their content.

We're looking to expand into all of the areas that our users are interested in, which topics would you most like to see?

Looking forward to seeing what is posted in the "Python" department!

I would love some PHP but that's asking for to much.

(This is a joke patterned off the "Patches welcome!" response common in the OSS community, but it's also very serious: high quality web development tutorials do not spring into existence from the ether. You can either write them, pay directly for them, or hope that someone subsidizes their creation. Hoping for subsidy will tend to result in less tutorials being written than the market would prefer to exist.)

Producing a decent 15 minute screencast takes hours of preparation. At decent billable rates, that means hundreds of dollars per episode. Plus these are videos with real value, that if they do their job, allowing the watcher to earn tens of thousands of dollars more per year.

As for free tutorials, you're a Google search away an essentially limitless library (many of which were written by some of the screencasters that make you sick). I've learned from free material, but I also feel that that an on-point screencast is worth a few dollars. That's why I'm more than happy to pay for RailsCast, Tapas, CodeSchool, and more, every month.

As for "should be free", I really don't know where you get this. In a world where information is a scarce resource, perhaps. That's not the world we live in, and I hope all that can add value all the best in selling their expertise.

Take Ryan Bates for example, I would be hard-pressed to find a good Rails developer who hasn't picked up a thing or two from Railscasts. And $9/month is nothing compared to the wealth of knowledge one can get for that price. We simply want to enable more developers like Ryan to produce quality educational content and monetize it, if they so wish, on Bitcast.