Archive for the ‘Video Services’ Category

Livestream announced a new mobile system, that fits in a backpack.  It lets you plug your HD camera into the gear in the backpack so that you can film and transmit in real time.  Their gear uses 3 different 3g carriers at the same time.

Feature set

• Turnkey hardware solution available today directly from Livestream
• Built-in wireless connection, encoder, battery and touch screen
• Six load-balanced 3G/EVDO modems included with data contract
• Power up, plug in any DV camera and press one button to go live
• Highest Quality – Up to 1 Mbps H.264
• Ideal for sporting events, city hall meetings, paparazzi, university graduations, transmission from a moving car, weddings, ceremonies and a variety of enterprise applications.

The battery pack and spare can give you up to 6 hours of constant HD streaming capabilities.

Pricing

During an SEO meetup meeting, I heard a referral for UserTesting.com.  Its a service that charges $29 to provide a website owner with both a video and written review of the usability or navigability of their website.

They charge $29 and pay a person $10 to capture screen video of their navigation of the site.  I think this could be a useful service for web designers and especially companies looking to test landing pages or even better checkout processes.

But if you are thinking of possibly making $30-40 per hour as the site itself mentions, watch out and reconsider applying!

I went through the application process tonight.  I thought I might make a good reviewer since

• I create video tutorials all the time
• I design web sites and am not inexpert at providing useful critiques for improvement
• People solicit my advice on this type of thing all the time
• I have a good deal of marginal or additional time where I could slip in a good review
• Plus, I thought more exposure to good and bad websites might help improve my own perspective and web design skills.

So I applied for an account, which took about 3 minutes.

I was then prompted to download and install their screen capture software.  Its kind of an automated combo deal.  It captures video from your screen and your voice as you narrate what you are thinking while you are working through any given site review.

After you download and install it, they have you work through what is supposed to be an example site (in this case it might have been a real site as the thing almost charged $26 to my PayPal account when I was testing the checkout process!  WATCH OUT FOR THAT ONE! )

Now despite almost taking $26 from me by accident, I don’t think the site is a scam.  It came from a trusted referral of a user that purchases reviews from them regularly.

I completed the video and the screen recorder proceeded to work the upload, which took forever.  I upload video all the time, and I’m guessing that this was an upload of a fully uncompressed video so the file size was probably about 120 mb if I were to guess based on the speed.

After all of that work (about 30 minutes of applying, recording a 12 minute video, like a try out or audition, and 16 minutes of upload time) I received an email that said the following:

Dear Brett,
Thank you for applying to be a user tester on UserTesting.com. We’ve received your sample video and written review.
Your demographics, video, and written review will be part of the algorithm used to determine how many jobs you receive. If you’re a fit, you’ll receive emails notifying you of paying jobs as they become available.
If you do not receive any emails from us within three weeks, then it is likely that you will not get any paying jobs. Unfortunately, this is the case for most applicants, since we currently have an oversupply of user testers.
The UserTesting.com Team
http://www.UserTesting.com

Well isn’t that a fine howdy do.  They could have mentioned that up front before I even bothered to go to all that trouble. 

So in general, I think this could be a useful service if you need in depth insight into what other people think of your website and how they use it from one page to the next.  At $29 I think its a bit of a bargain.

However, if you are thinking about reviewing sites for the service, I’d recommend thinking twice before investing the time for the service, especially as they have an OVERSUPPLY of testers. 

I can appreciate their oversupply, very common in internet businesses like this, but they should really offer up a disclaimer or simply shut down their application process for now, that must be a waste of their bandwidth and storage space not to mention potential goodwill of designers like myself that are potential customers as well as reviewers, not to mention bloggers. 

Parting Tip

If you do still go through the application process, I’m not sure what to think about the written review part of the site.  They sell customers both a video and a written review.  By the time you do a 5-15 minute review, you have covered a lot of ground.  They then throw a comment form at you to ask you a few questions.

The form itself is not designed in a way that really promotes the write up of a good review.  Its more of an open ended survey.

If they are judging reviewer auditions based on the written results, I suspect they might nix mine.  It was an average write up, even if the video review I did was pretty good.  I frankly didn’t realize that this ‘survey’ I was completing would actually become the ‘written review’.  There also does not seem to be anyway to preview your review, spell check it, nor edit it after the fact.

If you are looking to buy reviews, I’d caution you to expect good videos and mediocre to average written reviews.

Here’s just a quick tip, something I noticed on TubeMogul today.  I had just uploaded a video on TubeMogul to be launched through YouTube and other video services.

After it had been launched, I was given the option to connect to YouTube as well, which I did.

Now when one of my videos goes live on YouTube, a link to the video will be tweeted on my twitter account for me automatically. 

The cool thing is that they wait until the video is live.

For a while now, I ‘ve had a bit of a flash problem.  Some of my drop down menus, that are generated via css, drop down behind flash objects that I embed on my wordpress paqes, such as flash images generated by snagit (images with clickable hot spots) or youtube videos, or screencast videos.

I found this particularly helpful for menus that I have created with my preferred WordPress Theme Generator, Artisteer.

I found a partial fix that solves the problem for general flash or swf file objects, even youtube videos, but I’m still stuck on the screencast video option.

I found the solution in the comments section of this article.

The comments dialogue was a little difficult to follow, as people randomly offered up possible solutions in a comment brainstorm.

Ultimately, I was able to make the following actions work for me:

1. paste the following code within the <object tag : wmode=”transparent” ergo before you close the object tag with a >
2. you must also paste in an additional parameter tag as follows:  <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>

This created a solution that worked for me in both Firefox 3+ browsers and IE7.  Screencast has always provided problematic embedding code that has given me other fits in the past.

Note most people in the discussion seemed to settle on a slightly different solution using javascript and div tags.  If I could figure out how to get the Screencast video to render from javascript I might try this solution as well, but I have a suspicion that this might also generate code that is not valid xhtml . . .   

<script src=”swfobject.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<div style=”float:right;z-index:-100;” id=”player”>
This text will be replaced
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var so = new SWFObject(‘slideshow.swf’,'mpl’,’310′,’310′,’8′);
so.addParam(‘allowscriptaccess’,'always’);
so.addParam(‘allowfullscreen’,'true’);
so.addVariable(‘height’,’310′);
so.addVariable(‘width’,’310′);
so.addParam(“wmode”, “transparent”);
so.write(‘player’);
</script>

This is the question I’m asking myself this afternoon.  There was a time when Revver video quality, and the length of accepted video was superior to YouTube.  Bonus, they paid video publishers for the play and relative ad clicks that published videos received.  They even paid bloggers for republishing(embedding) other publishers videos on a blog.

It seemed like a magic formula for viral success with a profit driven process.

But for what ever reason they couldn’t keep the ship afloat and on course.  A few months back they went completely offline for several weeks without a word.  They stopped paying at least some publishers, maybe all.  The ship was leaking and possibly going down.

I stopped publishing videos to Revver about that time for two reasons. 

1. My TubeMogul account with them, just stopped connecting.  I have lots of issues with TubeMogul.  I loved the service when it first went live but for reasons that are a mystery too me the service continually loses connections with my video accounts and never lets me re-establish a connection.  ????  I’ve put in a call to TubeMogul and left a message with Eugene, whom I met at a couple of the new media events (New Media Expo and Blogworlds).  I do not know if they are going down for the count too, if there is a bug in the system or my account, or if this is their passive-aggressive way to get me to upgrade my account.  (The problem with TubeMogul’s account upgrades is that they don’t publish their service fees which is sketchy at best, and problematic for new customers to test their services and ROI at worst.  Any company that provides online services and does not disclose their rates is making a big mistake.)
   1. Disclosure – I’m wearing a TubeMogul t-shirt while I type this article.
2. The more important reason had to do with Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I did a lot of video demos and tutorials with Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I collected these in a blog and on a landing page for the product and earned a living from the process through affiliate commissions.  For a while I included Revver videos, but they were serving up ads to my competitors and sucking traffic away.  Even worse some of those ads showed fake prices and that was torpedoing conversions for the visitors that went through my funnel anyway.

My own revver videos were literally hurting business, and then to put the rotten icing on the cake, they stopped paying. 

So now, I’m looking at the ugly situation of either leaving existing videos there, or deleting them.  In general, I do not like to delete content anywhere.  Especially videos that can be embedded as I lose touch with deep links that might be pointing in to me.  But I think in this case I may be looking at a situation where it makes sense to chuck them.

YouTube has been elevated to such heights by its own success, that you may not have come across these 4 other video services.  There from 4 of the biggest (sometimes legacy) names on the internet, Yahoo!, MySpace, AOL, and even Google (in case you forgot Google tried to knock off YouTube before throwing in the towel and buying YouTube itself.

The thing is almost all of these services (like YouTube btw) screw with the compression of your video.  Ergo, you can create a perfectly good looking video on your computer, upload it to their site and they will recompress it in a different format.  What this means is that your video will often be distorted when you use any of these services.

Its kind of like if you take silly puddy and roll it out like cookie dough on a newspaper photograph of the Main Street USA.  The image of the photograph will be captured on the silly puddy.  Then you take the silly puddy and hand it to a three year old, who proceeds to stretch the picture into some new frame size and before you know it you are looking at a pixelated las vegas strip in puddy.

That’s kind of like what these services do as they attempt to fit videos that you load up of dimension A with shape B, into Shape C with dimension D.

Here are a few examples of the unfortunate results that I found with these services:

Yahoo!

MySpace

Google Video

In the Google example, if you embed the video its going to be significantly different than if you view it on the actual site. 

AOL

So here’s a tip, quadruple check your spellings!

I was just about ready to write the final obituary on my favorite video sharing service, Revver. They have been down for days, and even before they were down, I could no longer upload videos to them via TubeMogul, plus, many users have been complaining that they have not received a payment from Revver for the last 2 months!

This Revver activity chart kind of shows the days they went dark, but I think the drop off in mid October might actually have signaled some of the first problems(slow loading videos, pages not found etc)

Well, just when all was looking darkest, the site lit back up again and the python errors seemed to disappear. The site is still running slow as a dial up connection, but up is better than down. Who knows, maybe all those videos will not be dropped from Google’s index even.

Whether Revver will stay up, pay anyone or go back down again is still anyone’s guess.

Here’s my recommendations:

• If you have videos on Revver, make sure you have them backed up.
• Download them from Revver if you don’t, and upload them to a more reliable video server.
• Don’t delete your videos from Revver. That will just waist time and possibly make things more unstable. A little retribution might feel good temporarily, but its not going to do anyone, including yourself any good.
• Let us know if you actually get paid(and we’ll share too). Getting paid is always one of the best ways to gauge whether or not a business is going to stay alive or not. If they can’t pay you, odds are they can’t pay anyone including employees and hosts.

That’s all I’ve got for now, will share more as I find it.  Guess I picked the wrong month to try and run a viral cooking show under the concept of will it fry (like will it blend) but using a paella pan instead.  That’s the breaks. 

I have a separate site where I run 2 Revver widgets.  These are scrollable video lists that reside in my sidebar.  A user can click on the video thumbnails and a video overlay pops up where someone can watch my Revver video.

THE PROBLEM with more than one Revver Widget Installed on the same Page

So the problem, is that I had 2 widgets on my site.  The second batch of videos worked just fine, but the first batch, did not.

When you clicked on a thumbnail video from the first list, it attempted to load the video and then redirected to a 404 page error.

The culprit was not exactly obvious, but not completely hidden from view either.

Example of Error

The FIX of this Multiple Widget Revver Installation Error

If you install more than one set of widget code, copying and pasting the widget code into your site like this:

There’s a code tip from Revver that mentions that the first line of the javascript can not exist twice or more on the same website page.

So make sure you delete all subsequent lines of this code and your widgets should work.

Phwew, now that I have that fire put out on my own site, I can get back to troubleshooting some problem with one of my laptops that is bugging out on actual video production due to a ram issue ~ XP only recognizes 3 gigs instead of the 4 gigs that is installed.

I work with more video converting tools than I know what to do with these days.  Here’s the latest easy Video converter for iPods and iPhones.

FREE TRIAL iPod Video Converter Download

FREE Trial iPhone Video Converter Download

You can convert most video formats to something useful for your iPod or for your iPhone.

Both converters are free to use with the trial offer.  If it turns out that this is what you are looking for, it only costs $29.99 to unlock the full iPod video converter or the iPhone video converter which is a lot cheaper than many more high powered video converters out there.

Free iPod Video Converter Formats

Video Conversion Blogging Tip

If you have a Video Podcast, Video Blog or even sell old shows from a streaming video program on your website or blog, you should definitely consider converting the video into multiple formats so that your visitors and subscribers can grab the version that works best for them.  If you ran a newspaper, you wouldn’t purposefully make the print so small that everyone had to read it with magnifying glasses, you’d make it large enough to be easy to read. 

With this tool, you can convert the file for them so that they don’t have to do the work.  That makes it easy for them to continue reading or viewing your content and that means happy customers and better readership.

How the iPod and Iphone Video converter tools work

Angel iPod Video Converter supports all of the popular multimedia devices including iPod, Apple TV, MP4 player, MP3 player and mobile iphones. Select the multimedia files, the intended devices or formats, and hit “Encode” to convert multimedia files to the right format for your intended devices. For advanced users, you can just answer a few easy to follow questions to convert your media files to the exact specifications.

Here’s a Cool Tip I stumbled upon by accident.  When you want to embed an Utterz item in a blog article and you use my favorite blogging tool, Windows Live Writer (Free software from Microsoft), its very very easy!

Below you will see the players I used for the example video above.  If you’d like to see more examples or have any questions, drop me a comment and I will take a look at covering your question next time around if its something I can help with.

So that’s it, just a simple thing.  hope you benefited from this and if you are not blogging with Windows Live Writer or Utterz for that matter, your are missing something that is a very useful experience and easy to do whether you are a tech blogger or a movie buff with a collection of rare movie posters or whatever.