Viddler

Last week I had the privilege to sit down and interview Gary Vaynerchuk about his show Wine Library TV.

Gary’s the kind of guy who completely immerses himself in the things he’s passionate about. His office sits atop two stories of wine, inside is enough valuable Jets memorabilia to open a small museum, and scattered throughout the room you’ll find all kinds of video equipment that is used for his show. Anyone who passes through his doorway encounters two giant crates of WLTV-branded armbands that say “Bringing The Thunder” on them; one right outside his door, and one right inside his door. The man loves armbands.

Walking into Gary Vaynerchuk’s office is like walking onto a TV set. “Oh wow,” you think. “I’ve seen this couch before. It looks so much smaller in person!”

But despite the cameras, the lights, and the familiar set pieces, you quickly realize the biggest difference between Gary’s office and a television set: Gary’s office is a place where real things get done.

He’s constantly hustling. In the short time we were there he handled several meetings and filmed three videos (not including ours). No spare moment went to waste. In the few extra minutes he had while we set up our lights and cameras, he hopped on his computer and engaged with his fans, responding to emails, replying to tweets, and even snapping a picture for his DailyBooth account.

At Viddler, we’re infinitely grateful that Gary has brought this passion and work ethic to our video platform. He’s played a role in using Viddler to promote his personal brand, his best-selling book, and even his sports heroes. But Gary’s flagship show, Wine Library TV, is possibly his most impressive use of Viddler. Just a few weeks ago, Wine Library TV surpassed 900 episodes, and Gary shows no signs of stopping.

To share how all of this got started, and how video continues to add value to Gary’s businesses, I created a video profile where Gary discusses WLTV’s beginnings and the long-term impact the show has had on his life. I hope you find it as inspiring to watch as it was for me to make.

Today we are super excited to announce our native integration with GetClicky to help support Real Time Video Analytics:

As discussed this integration provides:

1. More insight into how individual users engage with video on your site.
2. How hosting video relates to conversion of users to specific goals (ie. purchasing something on ecommerce site)
3. Helps answer the question: should I be producing/embedding more video?
4. How does Viddler keep people on your site vs. others embeddable players?

Top Down View of All Videos:

How Video Performs Per User Actions:

Actions Per User Stream:

To get started with this simply signup at GetClicky.com and embed Viddler videos on your site.

We would love to hear your integration stories. Please don’t hesitate to leave in comments below!

I hope you’re excited for this glorious Monday! We have some phat beats heading down you’re intertubes to get you groovin’. If you’re at work, then “groovin’” equates to productivity, right? Right!

Radar Music Videos (subscribe) has provided a grimey music video from R.I.O. That’s R.I.O with two periods, not three. And, yes, grime is actually one of the genres R.I.O falls under — along with hip hop and electro.

Here’s the music video to R.I.O’s second single “Mr. Unpredictable”. Find out more about R.I.O below the video.

The heads-up on R.I.O

His birth name is Rio Nelson and he was born as in Manchester, U.K, but spent some of his teenage years on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean, and Chicago in the USA. In fact, he represented the St. Vincent in youth international level in a World Cup Qualifier.

When he was 18 he dropped his football career to focus on making music. He began making wildly successful mix-tapes and collaborating with other well-known rap teams. The urban music scene well and truly took a liking to his beats.

Now, at 24-years-old, he’s dreaming big — and it all the right ways. Rather than doing all the typical celebrity appearances on television and shows, he’s interested in being a big role model for teenagers by touring around to secondary schools. He hopes to have then understand that if he can get to where he is, then they can too. If that isn’t being an awesome role model, then I don’t know what is!

Read more about Rio’s entry into the urban music scene in this in-depth interview he did for CityLife.

Check out R.I.O’s MySpace and Twitter for frequent updates!

Here at Viddler, we have traditionally known that it is almost NFL time when traffic to our office is swamped with Escalades and high profile cars driving to Eagles training camp here in Bethlehem (we are 2 minutes away from Eagles preseason training facilities).

Now we have something else to remind us that NFL is coming, that being Joe Nameth’s new video blog, BroadwayJoe.tv:

I know that many of you are infected with Garyvee’s NJ Jet passion so make sure to get your additional fix on his new daily show:

• Facebook
• BroadwayJoe.tv – make sure to subscribe to newsletter or RSS
• RealJoeNameth on Twitter
• Broadway Joe Shwag

His first episode focuses on offensive line. And I couldn’t agree with him more!

Here at Viddler we have a fairly sophisticated software development process.  We design, review, build, review, test, launch to development/staging servers, test, and then there’s Quality Assurance (QA).  We coordinate our pushes to update the live site (Viddler.com) with our developers, sys admins, testers, and QA. We do a live update every 3 weeks or so.

I’m pretty adamant about sticking to the process – no patches should be made to the live site in between formal updates.  Any exception, the patch needs thorough testing on the development servers and then testing and QA after the patch is pushed to our live site.  I tell the story of the AT&T programmer who only changed 2 lines of code – and brought down the entire northeast phone network for an afternoon. Folks here snicker – but I saw it happen.

Today I broke my own rule.  We had a bug on our reseller’s dashboard.  Our developer found the bug, fixed it and tested.  And then asked me, “Should we patch the live site now or wait till our next push?”  Without hesitating (and without testing) I said push it live.  It was pushed at 6:30PM EDT – and I didn’t test after the push.  And it broke logging in.  No one, not anyone, could log into Viddler.com.  It was literally one line of code.  I was living my own worst nightmare.

Thankfully, we have an amazing team – which was rallied (some out of bed in the middle of the night), and by 11PM a 2^nd fix was made (turns out it wasn’t the one line of code, but the restarting of some new processes during the push) and everyone can once again log into Viddler.com.

I am dreading going to the office tomorrow.  Maybe I can call in sick?  Think they’ll be suspicious?

The moral is: never, ever, push a code change live without thorough testing – even if its one line of code. And there is a reason for a process.

Thank you and good night.