Aapka Video, is a new video sharing site, targeting the Indian video sharing community. Now how big the Indian video sharing community is, I am not really sure, but Aapka Video aims to create directors out of you, and provides you the standard sharing capabilities of video uploads, sharing, and viewing. The viewing and sharing features are free, while uploading requires registration and uploads are limited to 100 Megs per file. An array of video formats are supported along with tagging and offensive video reporting features.

For The Viewer
If you are familiar with YouTube, then you will get the hang of Aapka Video right away. The site has a simple design, and that makes it easy to get around the site, and discover some of the features of the site. I started out looking through the videos in order to get a feel for the content and the site. I was hoping to run into some interesting amateur video content, but what you see right away are your standard bollywood clips, clips from TV shows and ads. It’s quiet possible that being a new site, some of the initial content is going to come from main stream media and entertainment sources. Given time, provided the site becomes a popular hub for Indian video sharing, it’s likely more content from regular users will start showing up.

If you do a search or browse via categories, you can dig up some amateur videos on Aapka Video. Here are a few to give you an idea of the potential of Aapka Video:

• Girls dancing to tamil song
• Malayalam Song
• Sardar Pop Song
• Kakka Kakka
• Fear Factor

Overall, after I got over the initial, this is not youTube so it’s going to suck attitude, and then got past the steamy Bollywood videos layer, and landed in the underbelly of Aapka Video, where the amateur videos live, I started to thoroughly enjoy Aapka Video as a viewer. I found myself jumping from video to video via similar videos, categories, searching, more videos, and tagging. All that clutter you normally see around YouTube videos don’t exist in Aapka video, making it a very simple clean site providing a much better feel for viewing videos.

For the Uploader
In order to upload videos, you have to sign up first. The sign-up process was simple and the only thing that bothered me was the 8 character limit on passwords, especially when you have a password which is nine characters long! After you log in, you are taken to your account page. However, if you return to the home page, the site does not remember that you have logged in, and there isn’t a way to go back to your account page, other than logging in again or using a bookmark of the account page.

Moving on, I was really impressed with the upload process, very simple, very little to fill in, and speedy. Plus the uploaded video shows up on the home page under the recently added section, giving your videos some instant exposure on the main page. Moving some of the edit features for a video to show up around the video could improve overall usability. Another improvement would be to show the video embed and link code on the video page, rather than in a pop up, to make it easier to copy the code.

Conclusion
Overall, the site is well made, functions well, and is fun to use. Being a beta version, there are a lot of issues to be resolved and usability issues to be improved. Some of the issues that need to be addressed include the video player issues in Firefox and login session issues. As for content, there is great potential here for amateur video from India, provided some of the Bollywood and main media content can be toned down. I would also suggest that Aapka Video revisit sites like YouTube and Vimeo in order to improve some of the capabilities and usability of the site.

This review was paid for by Aapka Video