Viddler

Viddler’s an online video company, plain and simple.  What we take pride in, however, are the unique things that we empower people to do with their content.  By giving our users an added level of control, customization, and functionality, we’ve developed a valuable and one-of-a-kind video platform.  We’ve created a video service that’s perfect for establishing a brand, building off of the philosophy that embedded video should be an extension of one’s own site and personality, not a traffic-sucking portal to a third party service.

Our team is dedicated to building and refining these tools, so much that we’ve never really had the chance to fully utilize them for our own purposes.  I was brought onboard to help with this, and ever since I joined the team I’ve been struggling to properly name my role.  I was given the title of Video Wizard, but as I’ve said elsewhere I can neither perform magic nor grow a beard, so that never felt appropriate.  So what am I?  Am I an internal video producer?  A new media marketer? A multimedia liaison?

The answer, I’ve found, is much less glamourous:  I’m a professional eater.  Unlike my peers Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut, however, you won’t find me devouring mounds of hot dogs or chugging pitchers of beer—at least not professionally.  No, I’m the guy eating a big ol’ plate of dog food poured straight from a bag with Rob‘s face on it.

I’m constantly inspired by all the different ways individuals are using Viddler to grow and enhance their brands, and I’ve set out to do the same for Viddler itself.  So far I’ve used our video platform to promote our existing services, announce product launches, and showcase our fantastic customers.  The next step is to use video to enhance and clarify the information on our existing static webpages.

Introducing Viddler Help videos.  Over time I’ll be adding videos to the various support documents in the Viddler Help section.  They’re designed to be short and to the point, providing quick and clear answers that waste as little of your time as possible.

The first one—a quick overview of how to get HD to work on Viddler—is embedded below.  Hit me up in the comments if you have any specific help section items that you think could be better clarified by a video, or if you think there’s anything in particular that could benefit from a longer-format screencast.

Woof woof, y’all.

Viddler Partner Engadget (engadget) always has the best gadget coverage on the Web and we’re proud to be their choice for online video. Yesterday they published an excellent full review of the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.

Here is a quick video that Engadget’s Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky has put together showing an overview of the new phone and a few of the new features in iOS 4.

He also created this video using the iPhone 4 with built-in iMovie (meaning that he recorded, edited, and published this video from the iPhone 4) and shared it on Viddler.

We recommend you read the entire iPhone 4 review and subscribe to Engadget for the best coverage of tomorrow’s top gadgets.

The Internet has done a lot for the video medium.  It has leveled the playing field for publishers of all sizes, and made worldwide distribution as easy as clicking “upload.”  Instead of targeting people on their couches, many independent producers started targeting people at their desks.  The desktop viewing experience even began to rival that of television with the adoption of HD video on the web, something we introduced back in August of last year.

But recently we’ve seen the widespread adoption of an entirely new category of Internet-connected devices.  Things like the iPhone and the iPad are finally making the consumption of online video more portable and more practical.  At Viddler, we’re really excited about all the new ways people will be able to consume video in the future, and we want to help our customers deliver their content to new devices with the most optimized experience possible.  But we also want to make sure that we preserve one of the key elements that made online video take off in the first place: the ability to reach millions of people with that one single click of the upload button.

Today we’re thrilled to announce Viddler 2.9 and the introduction of our new multi-format video encoder.  We’ve rebuilt our encoder from the ground-up, not just to ensure faster and more reliable encoding, but also to enable us to output to a variety of video formats.  The new encoder allows us to more easily adapt over time to support emerging video platforms and the formats they require, helping us deliver your content to a larger number of devices today, and helping future-proof your content for tomorrow.  To assist me in illustrating some of the things that Viddler 2.9 can do for you right away, I recruited the help of my friend Bentley McCormick:

Business customers and Partners can head over to the new encoding settings page to check out all of the new options.  And if you’d like to take advantage of the new support for HTML5 playback on iOS devices, the new iPad/iPhone-compatible embed code can be found on the Your Videos page.

The new multi-format encoder is just one of many changes in Viddler 2.9. To find out about some of the other improvements, stay tuned right here on the blog over the coming days.

Something fun for Friday. Viddler member nonelikejoshua puts together some really great remixes that he raps to. This one, which features a track from Ronald Jenkees (who is also a Viddler), is particularly great.

Thanks to nonelikejoshua for sharing his remixes with us. We’ve put one up on the frontpage for the day.

Bernie, Softball All-Star

Working for a small company has many benefits. Team members are more like family than just “coworkers”, we can move more quickly as a company when making decisions and getting things done and we all have the opportunity to wear many different hats everyday.

Here at Viddler it is no different. We have very strong relationships with each other, our customers and our community as a whole. We are able to be very nimble and move fast when we see an emerging technology that we feel will benefit our users.

The best benefit of working at Viddler for me is that I have the chance do many different “jobs” every single day. It makes “work” fun. Our Customer Support team (which is Bryan and Bernie (that’s me) right now) handle many more tasks than simply answering our customer’s questions.

For example; if you recently signed up for a B2B account you more than likely got a call from Bryan to ask if you had any questions or if you would like a tour of your Viddler account. Bryan also handles confirming business accounts and payment collections. Besides being the main customer support contact for some of our larger B2B accounts, I also handle most of the Quality Assurance (or bug testing) on new tools for us to use to help you. I also work with potential clients to see if Viddler is the correct solution for them and explain the capabilities of Viddler and our API.  And finally I help people get setup for advertising campaigns on Viddler.

Excellent customer support, by answering threads in our forums and promptly replying to support tickets and emails, will always be the primary focus for Bryan and I. But putting on a different hat now and then keeps things fresh and fun for us day-to-day.

The Wired app for the iPad has gotten a lot of attention since its debut for being both a thoughtful and compelling edition of their popular print magazine. Viddler macgasm has shared a pretty cool video showing it in action.

Soon five Viddler team members will have iPads (with more to come I’m sure). We’re all very much looking forward to the future of magazines on the iPad, Kindle, Nook and other reading devices that make reading fun, interactive, and social.

Don’t forget to enroll in our HTML 5 beta that makes your videos available on the iPad, iPhone and other devices that support HTML 5 video playback. More details about this beta here.

I’ve been a fan of Wine Library TV since Episode 7. Shortly after that WLTV’s host Gary Vaynerchuk and I worked together on several projects. Next I came and started here at Viddler in early 2007 and, naturally, asked Gary to come with me (he’s an Advisory Board Member and active user of Viddler with his own personal account, Wine Library TV, Obsessed TV and Gourmet Library.)

That is why I am extremely proud to announce that I’m on today’s episode of Wine Library TV with my good friend Gary drinking some excellent Port wine. I’m also proud to announce that Wine Library TV is now available, from their site, on the iPad and iPhone thanks to Viddler’s still-in-beta HTML 5 support.

Thanks for working so closely with me over the last few years Gary and for having me on the show.

Video is at the core of our business and yet we never seemed to be all that great at creating them. Various excuses cropped up over the years – being busy, not having the proper tools, being picky about the details, etc. etc. So, to help correct that problem we’ve hired Billy Disney to be our official Viddler Videographer.

Here is a short video introduction (that I created, not him) of Billy:

You can see some of Billy’s handy work in our recent Business Services video and our Business Profile video for Gamervision. He has a lot more in store for us here at Viddler and we’re excited to have him.

Here’s the deal: people love play buttons.  They just can’t help but click them.  Users enjoy interacting with rich media on the web, and that’s part of the reason we’re so passionate about online video.

The play button on our player is no exception, and when visitors go to the page for our B2B services, they’re greeted by a bright and shiny version of the Viddler player.  The play button just sits there, its oh-so-temping triangular shape just begging for attention.  “Click me,” it whispers seductively.

The only problem is that prior to today, the player on that page wasn’t a player at all.  It was just a screenshot of our player. But as you can see from the heatmap above, we quickly realized—thanks to tools like Crazy Egg—that people were still trying to click play.  And they couldn’t help it.  Play buttons are sexy.

It became clear that the screenshot-where-mouse-clicks-go-to-die couldn’t be allowed to stick around much longer, and so I set out to replace it with an actual video.  Today I’d like to share that video with you.  It’s a quick and simple overview of what Viddler B2B is all about.  Enjoy.

Greetings, internets! Andrew here. I’m Viddler’s “Lead Designer”, but sometimes—when nobody’s looking—I write code. I hope you won’t tell. You won’t, will you? Of course not.

Anyway, sometimes my cold web designer heart shows a glimmer of humanity and I release some of the code I write. For free. And not the kind of “free” where it’s really not free because you have to pay for it. The real kind of free. Free-of-charge free. That kind of free.

Okay, moving on. So today is one of those times. The times I release software, I mean. This bit of software I have dubbed “Pack”.

(Warning: jargon ahead. If your family has a history of jargon-allergies, you may want to consult a physician and skip the next few paragraphs).

Basically, Pack is a command-line tool that lets you combine and compress CSS and JavaScript files in automated but very customizable ways. It’s really handy for when you want your website’s CSS and JavaScript files to be as optimized as possible.

Pack is written in Ruby and uses Google Closure to compress Javascript. I’ve released it on GitHub here: http://github.com/ashrewdmint/pack. Since it’s written in Ruby, it’s a snap to hook up with the popular Ruby deployment framework, Capistrano.

If you made it this far and haven’t lost consciousness, congratulations! Here’s a picture of a cat using a computer: