Viddler

We love bringing you great examples of brands breaking new ground with Viddler’s technology. Today we want to share Beckinfield.com, the first ever mass participation web series.

What’s a Mass Participation Web Series?

It’s a NEW new media experience, an ongoing web series where anyone can join in, create a character, and play a part.

It is also a social community of like minded creatives who inspire one another, collaborate on subplots, and just have a blast creating this new genre of entertainment. Or, you can just watch.

Cool! How can I get involved?

The sci-fi story of Beckinfield goes like this; citizens have been asked to record video blogs showing the world what everyday life is like in their small town. It soon becomes clear that life in Beckinfield is far from typical. The quirky residents (of which you are one) are suspicious of the local governments denials of the town oddities; snooping scientists, alleged UFOs, seemingly haunted libraries, earthquakes that “caused no damage” … and that’s just the beginning.

As a Beckinfield resident, you upload video blog entries describing your opinions of, and reactions to, these events. The format gives you the creative freedom to follow the scripted story, or make up your own. It’s a playground for creativity. And Beckinfield.com makes it even easier with weekly story updates, tutorials, and a plethora of inspiring activities.

Viddlers can shape the future of Mass Participation TV

The guys at Beckinfield are inviting all Viddlers to become a part of the future of entertainment. If you sign up at Beckinfield.com, with the promo code VIDDLER you’ll get 2 free months of full access; create and play your own character, interact with the community, peruse the tutorials and become a part of the show. They’re also inviting us to join the New Beckinfield Historical Society, to give them feedback and guidance from our experience there.

Check it out at Beckinfield.com, promo code VIDDLER.

At Viddler, we’re all about providing you with a simple video workflow. That’s why our video privacy options let you set a default for your preferred settings. Pulled from the Viddler Help archives, check out the video below to learn more about your Default Sharing Options.

Do you love Breaking Bad? Bryan Cranston and AMC want to hear why Breaking Bad is your favorite show! Join the I Love Breaking Bad Video Challange and submit your video telling the world why you and your friends love Breaking Bad. Upload your video by May 26th, 2011 in order to be eligible to have your video shown in a commercial on AMC. Be passionate, be real, and don’t forget to watch Season 4 of Breaking Bad this July on AMC.

Do you want to create your own challange? Use Viddlers Contest Manager tool and get started today!

Take full control over who can view your videos with a wide variety of privacy and security options.

1.  Make your videos private on an account level or on a per video basis.
2.  Secret URL lets you share private videos by simply linking someone to a private web address.
3.  White list domains so videos can only be played back on websites you approve of.
4.  Age gate feature restricts your videos to certain audiences.

Viddler makes sure that your private videos stay private and let’s you share your videos without compromising security.

Last week our President Rob Sandie and fellow team member Darryl Rentz headed to NYC to attend Streaming Media East 2011.  Rob had the opportunity to sit down with Beet.TV to discuss Viddler’s storied history, present, and bright future including value added services such as Contest Manager and Subscriptions.

Watch the full interview below and read the full article at Beet.TV that also discusses Viddler’s partnership with Gawker Media.

We’re very proud to provide hosted video solutions for the Engadget Show, and earlier this month they won the People’s Voice award in the Online Film & Video category at the 15th annual Webby Awards.

I had the opportunity to profile the Engadget Show back in February. Check out how Engadget uses Viddler to customize and control their online video experience, or watch the latest episode of the show below, featuring the new host, recently appointed editor-in-chief Tim Stevens. Congratulations to Chad Mumm and the rest of the team behind the show.

Even though YouTube has become the industry standard and has proven to be the platform for viral sensations, Zachary Sniderman of Mashable points out “There are plenty of other high-quality video platforms with competitive features for specialized markets.”  Viddler is mentioned along with Blip.tv, Vimeo, Flickr, Veoh, DailyMotion, and yfrog.  Mashable highlights mostly free services as alternatives but gives the nod to Viddler as the go-to video platform for player branding and other business tools.

Viddler:

What it is: Billed as a way to build your brand, Viddler is more geared to companies and corporations than homemade video.

Features: With the business focus comes business tools — Viddler lets users access analytics, customize their video players, distribute to iTunes, place comments within the video and even monetize with Viddler’s adworks tool.

Why Viddler?: If you’re a brand looking to up your video content, Viddler provides a stable starter kit with an array of support features.

Read the full article on the 7 Youtube Alternatives and let us know how you feel about YouTube vs. other digital video platforms.

Recently our very own Systems Architect, Todd Troxell, took a little time out of his busy schedule to sit down with High Scalability and share the details on Viddler’s architecture.  High Scalability describes Viddler’s architecture as, “It’s an interesting mix of different technologies, groups, and processes, but it somehow seems to all work.”

Check out the post on High Scalability’s blog to read the full interview and learn more about Viddler’s platform architecture.

The Stats

1. About 7 million embed views per day.
2. About 3000 videos uploaded per day.
3. 1500 req/sec at peak.
4. ~130 people pressing the play button at peak.
5. 1PB of video served in February
6. 80T of storage
7. 45,160 hours of CPU time spent on video encoding in last 30 days
8. Usage is relatively flat throughout the day, with only a ~33% difference between valley and peak which suggests they get a lot of usage globally. graphic.

Through our numerous importing and uploading options, we make it as easy as possible to get your videos online.  Whether you are uploading from your iPhone or a professional grade camera, we support it! Watch the video below to learn about our simple web-based uploading, resumable uploader, webcam recorder, batch uploading, FTP uploading, and our direct upload API.  Also take a look around the Uploading to Viddler Help articles for more information.

Please visit our revamped Learn More page to see what else Viddler can do for you.

We’re rockin’ some pretty powerful video tools over here at Viddler. Stuff that lets you completely customize your video players, keep your videos safe, gather video analytics—all kinds of good stuff. But when you see our customers use these tools in practice, the end result is always different. Some people might use us solely for our support for video playback on mobile devices, and others might be more interested in the ways they can use Viddler to make money from online video.

So we recognized the need to more clearly showcase all of the things that Viddler is capable of. Presenting the new, more in-depth Learn More page. The new page still includes the overview video from the old page, but now lets you drill down into details with different specific categories on the left side. And we like to practice what we preach, so each one of these sections contains a video to explain the selected feature set.

So head over to viddler.com/learn-more and check out the new section for yourself. Let us know what you think, or tell us how you’re using Viddler to help educate people about what you do.