Continuing the discussion on how to improve the visibility of openHAB on YouTube
Questions:
There is an official openHAB-YT-channel (www.youtube.com/@_openHAB):
Perhaps we could work together to produce content for this channel?
Who can be approached for this?
There are several cool YT-Channels that used to deliver really great content on openHAB,
but some of them have reduced their activity over the last months:
@HuTaxxx points out in one of his recent videos that the number of subscribers and views is constantly decreasing
Any ideas on how to help and encourage them to produce more content?
No idea, but we now are at OH4 and their videos were produced for OH3. Like any other content in the web, to have visibility you need to make frequent updates.
Hey @simcla, thanks for your engagement here!
Yes, I would also love to see more content on our YT channel (and on others as well).
2.5 years ago, we started to revive the channel and hired @MichaelBrunner to help us on this. It went well for a while, but unfortunately the activity slowly declined and came to a halt by end of last year. Michael says that it became too tedious to find interesting content and that he didn’t manage to find people in our community to provide input or serve for interviews.
I see from your other thread that there are indeed volunteers for content and it would be fantastic to get some live back again into the channel. Granting access to our YT channel to persons who are engaged is the least problem.
If I am not mistaken, you are at our event in Solingen tomorrow, so that might be a perfect time to discuss this further!
i thought i should respond to this topic
as some of you probably know and as @Kai mentioned i was taking care of the openHAB YT Channel in 2021-2022. Besides that i´m running my own Channel BangerTECH which was created to produce exclusively openHAB content.
In the last 1-2 years a lot has changed regarding to my channel and openHAB in general.
For me openHAB was by far the best SmartHome System from prob. 2018-2022 then things got shaken up by HomeAssistant. For me it´s still the best but as you guys probably experience HomeAssistant is everywhere. There are several Things which leads to a bigger Gap between these two Systems.
For example HA comes up with something new almost every month, new functions (BLE Presence, Voice, Matter…) , new frontend stuff…
besides that they got their own Hardware with HomeAssistant yellow/green. That of course leads to more media presence and collaborations with companies who work together with HomeAssistant or print the HA Logo on their Products which again leads to more media presence.
Same is true for YouTube…because there are not many “great” inventions on openHAB in the last couple months only a few people will make content for this System. For me at least it´s really hard to find new and innovative Topics which are worth making a video. Don´t get me wrong we (in openHAB) got some great functions, everything works flawlessly and you can do really cool stuff with it but on the Frontend Side of Things HA looks a bit more modern i would say. Just take the Floorplans for example.
With the official openHAB YT it was the same for me…hard to find any new and good topics for YT which people would actually enjoy and click. I was hoping that i would get more input from some openHAB officials. Not just interview stuff more like what is coming next, which projects will be published soon and so on. @moody_blue you are kinda right, yeah of course OH4 is younger but did the System change a lot on the frontend side of things? Sure you would say internally there are a lot of changes but “normal” openHAB Users or Newcomer don´t care about that they care about how it looks and feel. Besides that most of my tutorials work on OH3 or even OH2 and for the YouTube algorithm most people just type openhab in the search bar.
Audience wise i get half of the clicks on a openHAB Video as i would get on a Product Collaboration Video.
As i´ve said before i´m still in love with openHAB and will always be but right now are risky times to loose connection to Beginners and Newcomers. There should be more Focus on new Functions, the Frontend, the Smartphone App and maybe on Hardware collaborations. At least thats how i see it
