With the incessant coverage of Akon and Danah at Zen and the subsequent DMCA takedown notice to YouTube by his record company, you may have yourselves visited or pointed someone to WestIndianTube.com to view the theatrics.

WestIndianTube.com is promoting itself as the “first West Indian or Caribbean based online video sharing community” that offers “the Caribbean people a place to share their personal and home based videos.” These are similar to the undisputed leader of online video, YouTube.

With much of the same functionality as YouTube, WITube allows for its users to upload videos of varying lengths up to 100MB in size, include titles, descriptions, tag creation, and channel selections as well as the ability to set an uploaded video to Public or Private.

When searching for a video you are presented with various options, from utilizing the most recent, most viewed and most discussed options to selecting specific channels and tags.

WITube has been able to attract a wide range of videos thus far with its most viewed undoubtedly being the Akon at Zen clips. These statistics on views however could be misleading as WITube suffers from similar ailments as YouTube with respect to the gaming of statistics. They do however have in place an IP tracker that allows for 100 views per day per IP address.

In addition to gaming, WITube has been subjected to uploads that would sooner be found on other YouTube clone sites such as YouPorn (NSFW) or PornoTube (NSFW). These uploaded X-rated videos did have a smattering of the local variation and validates the theory of Mini-Movies with Cellphones.

While they were quick to remove the offending videos, we nevertheless were able to capture a couple of screenshots.

I have to admit that WITube is well executed even though their legal status around copyright is sure to concern rights holder especially as they have now branched into hosting music files as well.

WITube should also be concerned with the cost of maintaining the type of infrastructure as it is terribly bandwidth intensive and as YouTube now has the backing of Google one would hope that WITube has some deep pockets.

Hopefully these issues when they arise won’t lead to the demise of WITube as a dedicated showcase, when properly done can create more value for its users.