We are well on our way to building Topwam with 5,000+ wam videos by early next year. We have passed 2200 videos online so far and Flaviu and I have 25,000 more videos to upload in the coming months, You can view the recent updates via these hashtags.
Just a reminder, we welcome other producers to use our free promotion feature and to paste their Youtube trailers on Topwam to increase their audience. Also for wam fans to paste their favorite clips into the site via our suggest a video feature.
If you have suggestions as to how we can make the site a better experience for wam fans, then let us know.
To quote Peter Cook and Dudley Moore from their 1978 comedy version of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" where they are all stuck in quicksand -- "we are all in it together".
indianbind said: Love the work and thanks so much for keeping the vintage clips alive!
One question: Will the non-AI scaled videos be made available in some capacity?
The AI scaling turns some low-resolution videos into uncanny valley and some folks like myself might just prefer the real deal in all its 280p glory.
Yes, the original versions for most old clips will also be made available. We are migrating videos from our old Topwam site and also uploading videos from several of our former websites like WAMFLIX and Fullscreenclips and TZmodels and also clips from my old 2002 clips site called Wamtec Gold. Wamtec Gold was my first clips site and was created 3 years before Youtube was invented, and then in 2005 they crushed us like Godzilla arising from Tokyo bay so I closed the site. In 2002 my Wamtec Gold site only had clips at 360p quality. I saved all those clips along with clips from my old site called TheWamBank and I will begin to upload those original format clips.
It is very easy to tell which clips are originals and which clips have been enhanced. All the original clips are being uploaded to the TOPWAM GENERAL category here ...
We know that the wam community is divided on whether they like enhanced clips or not, so we have created a simple division of the clips with different categories. So, if you don't care for enhanced clips then stick to the cheaper TOPWAM GENERAL category membership and avoid TOPWAM PREMIUM membership.
This migration process will take 6-12 months though, and we will only be uploading "some" of the old clips, which are at 360p and 480p quality. We will be deleting around 40% of the clips on the old Topwam site because we had a few thousands clips that were so poor quality at 144p and 240p and were made during the dial up era of the 1990s, and our new media player on the new Topwam site cannot work miracles and the streams will look terrible and pixelated if the content is not at least 360p, so we will have no choice but to dump all the 144p and 240p quality clips we accumulated.