Viddler

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.

WoW! It’s E3 time again. The 377 days since the last E3 seem to have whooshed by — don’t you agree?

Today is Day One and Microsoft already made all their announcements at their keynote yesterday afternoon. They revealed the Xbox 360 Slim, Kinect (code named Project Natal), and a slew of games for the Xbox 360.

If you’re not a gamer, then take note that the gaming industry has just as many rumors and leaks as the technology industry — albeit probably not as widely circulated as Apple rumors.

This year the hot items are definitely Microsoft’s and Sony’s 3D motion controllers; the Kinect and Move, respectively. They’re basically like a Nintendo Wiimote controller with more advanced tracking sensors. No doubt there will be demonstrations of these two devices all throughout E3.

With the obsession of 3D in the cinema and television industries I reckon there’s going to be some introduction of 3D gaming on 3D televisions. Talk about interactive!

We’ll keep an eye on E3 and update this post with any sweet videos that come out of the event.

Update 1: June 24th, 2010
Here’s an interview Joystiq had at E3 with Shuhei Yoshida, President Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios:

There’s tons of game trailers out from E3 and you can see them on Joystiq’s video page. My favorites are Sonic 4: Episode One and Gran Turismo 5.

Update 2: June 28th, 2010
The Game Show did a really great job of recapping E3 2010 in this episode:

There’s a bit of swearing in this video, so take caution blaring it on your speakers.

You can find much more videos from E3 by searching the E3 tag on Viddler.

If you have an event coming up or have covered one recently and would like us to give it a mention on the Viddler Blog, then send me a message and tell me all about it.

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.