Viddler

When we first launched Adworks here at Viddler we only had one way for you to give us your creative for your advertising campaigns, upload it. Even if you already uploaded it, you had to upload it again if you wanted to use it again. Did it work, sure, was it a best practice, obviously not.

We have pushed out the next release of Adworks that fixes a few minor bugs in the system as well giving the advertiser the ability to:

• Upload a new creative
• Use an already existing creative
• Enter a URL to your creative and we will download it
• Enter a DART or other textual ad tag

This will make your experience more user friendly and help streamline your campaign submissions. You can log into your Viddler account at Adworks and start creating campaigns here.

Below are a few screen shots of the different options you have to send us your creative when creating your campaign:

Choose Your Creative Type:

DART / Textual Tag:

Creative from URL:

Select a Previous Creative:

Upload a New Creative:

Want to get started today? Click here to log into your Viddler account at Adworks.

On what Web sites are my videos being seen? Which of my videos are the most popular? Which are the least popular? Who is watching my videos? How much of my video are they watching? Are my videos popular in France?

These are the questions that most businesses face when distributing video online. Video is now more portable than ever and while this gives your videos a potential world wide audience, it can be a real challenge to find the answers.

Until now. Viddler is proud to announce the immediate release of a new feature for our Business and Partner level accounts: Viddler Analytics. Here is a quick video overview of Viddler Analytics by our Lead Designer Andrew Smith.

Comprehensive statistics about your videos are now only a click away. Of course, Viddler Analytics answers even more questions than those above. How much storage has my account used this month? How much video bandwidth have we used so far? Am I close to my account level threshold yet? These questions, and others, are very important to our Business level accounts.

Our Partner level accounts have yet a different set of questions that they’d like answers to. Perhaps they’d like to know how many comments they’ve received on their videos, how much of the video was watched by how many people, or be able to drill down on a video-per-video basis for detailed statistics.

Viddler Analytics is a major leap forward in answering all of these questions and more. If you have a Business or Partner level account, you can access this new feature at Viddler.com/analytics/. If your account has not yet been upgraded to Business or Partner level, you can click on You > Upgrade (if you’re logged in) or visit our Business Services page.

Thanks to our friends at TubeMogul for providing us with a rich set of in-play statistics to make Viddler Analytics possible.

Viddler is dedicated to providing the very best online video service and experience for our customers and so we’re happy to be putting this tool into their hands today. If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comments.

About this Project

First, let me take some time to introduce myself, my name is Jeff Johns (@phpfunk on twitter) and I started here at Viddler back in May. One of the first projects I received in front of me after fetching everyone’s coffee, sharpening pencils and going on soda runs was a little project called Adworks.

Adworks has evolved day-to-day here at Viddler from a very simple concept for placing advertising orders online to what it is today; a self-service system that serves multiple facets.

The project has taken me a few months, from learning about ad servers, placements, insertion orders, etc.; to actually designing and coding the application. I also had the opportunity to do the marketing and the intro video for this product as well.

It has been quite a challenge, but quite a reward at the same time. I actually already have a to-do list of about 30 items that we will release at various stages as upgrades for this application. Stay tuned for some exciting times in video advertising, if you’re into that sort of thing

Now for my starchy white collar side to take over and explain what Adworks is as of now and what it will become as time moves on.

(more…)

If there is a common request among all Viddler members, whether you use Viddler for business or pleasure, it would be support for high-definition video. With our most recent launch, which included another frequently requested feature of uploading thumbnails, we have been testing HD video playback with a few of our partners and business service customers.

Take a few moments and watch the latest episode of Two Guys on Beer (tgob) in HD.

With this early beta version of HD on Viddler we’re hoping that your feedback, as both a viewer and a publisher, will help us make the next version of HD on Viddler better than we could have envisioned alone.

Here are the details on what we’ve launched with this version, what we’re hoping to accomplish in the future with HD, and how you can get involved during this beta period.

What does HD beta on Viddler mean?

• Full h.264 video playback with seeking!
• You control the quality. We allow flexibility between 1-4Mbps video bitrate @ 1280×720 or 720×480 resolutions.
• The viewers right to choose. Your audience is not forced to play the HD video.
• HD video on your site. HD quality playback is not only available on Viddler.com.

What is currently missing?

• HD from-now-on. All new videos will be distributed in HD. By request only we can back process all of your older videos.
• Auto-dection of client
• Forcing HD on Embed. We know that you’d probably like to embed a video and force it to display the HD quality by default. We’ll have this soon.
• Per video optional HD playback. Right now if you provide HD for all of your videos, they will all have the HD playback option. In the future, we’d like you to choose which videos have this option and which one’s do not.
• No “central HD section” on Viddler.com.

We know that we have a long way to go which is why we’d appreciate any feedback that you can give. We hope that by providing this beta and keeping the lines of communication open we can give our members exactly what they’re looking for. If you have any questions or would like to help us test HD – please do not hesitate to leave a comment or contact me directly.

Video specs for HD on Viddler

• Format: h.264
• File Extension: .mov, m4v, .mp4
• Resolution: 1280×720, 720×480
• Bit-rate: 500Kbps – 4Mbps

Providing video files with the above specs will automatically enable any pre-approved account to show the HD button on our player (see example above). If you’d like to take part in this beta program please leave a comment below!

We hope you love HD on Viddler as much as we do. Stay tuned!

After his first week away from his job in… ever, Gary Vaynerchuk has returned with episode #686 of Wine Library TV (subscribe).

With just a Flip video camera, three bottles of Italian varietals in America, and a super duper special guest whom will make this the greatest episode of Wine Library TV in the history of the show!

This episode begins with a 2005 Rosa D’Oro Barbera, followed by a 2005 Due Vigne Dolcetto, and finishes with a 2007 Andrew Will Annie Camarda from Washington. Well, it finishes with his special guest which I’m sure you’ll have guessed who it is.

Have you made a really exciting video lately? A rant? A huge event in your life? Tell me all about it by sending me a message.

In the week leading up to April 1st we held a competition open to everyone in which you had to fool the audience of your video that you were being honest.

I’ve held all of you in suspense for long enough, so let’s announce the winners.

Foolery: Ultimate Edition

Rog42 from Sydney, Australia, tricked us in to believing that we could get a discount from Microsoft by getting a tattoo behind our ear. He really does work for Microsoft, so was really sly. See his video below.

Rog42 scored himself the option between a ThinkGeek OR Amazon gift card to the value of $100 and a Viddler t-shirt! Giddy up!

The Cheeky Tricks

The only other participant in this contest was CheekTV. Their April Fools’ Day video was featured here on the blog and showed some fantastic ways to prank your friends in and around the home. Nice! Watch CheekTV’s video below.

What? That’s it? Yup! Now we’ve got all these spare t-shirts we’ll have to figure out what to do with. Participate next time, yo.

Here’s the video the won Rog42 the rad prize:

Here’s the video that won CheekTV sweet Viddler schwag:

Hello Viddlers! We’re happy to finally announce the release of version 2.46 of the Viddler platform. We released this update on April 1st, no joke intended, and have made a few small updates since then to stabilize the release.

This release one of our more complex releases in recent months. Where version 2.45 included 42 “tickets” 2.46 included 112! We’re constantly working very hard to keep the number of tickets in each release at a manageable level – but the main feature of this release is the cause for such a large amount of work.

Unicode Support. Every part of Viddler’s platform is now fully unicode compatible. This means that our player, web site, API, all now support international characters. So to those of you that require that support welcome!

Age gate. Some material is not meant for all audiences. Some is even governed by law to be shown only to those of a certain age. We’ve worked with our partners and business clients to create an age gate, or a simple splash screen that appears before the video to ask the viewer their age, so that they can better serve their audiences. Viddler partner Destructoid (destructoid) is using it here, as an example. (If you are logged into Viddler and have set your birthday you may not see the Age gate). Also: For a general overview of the feature you can watch Rob Sandie’s quick Age gate overview.

Billing updates for Business clients. We’re constantly updating our business offerings, services, support features, and now we’ve just made a big update to our billing processes. Billing is now being done in an automated fashion with the option to pay via Credit Card automatically every month. We expect to continue to update these processes in the next few releases.

API security and original file access updates. Our API is being updated with every release of the Viddler platform. Several business clients have asked for their accounts to be completely hidden from Viddler.com for various reasons. To that end we’ve added more security to the API to keep their data secure and private. We’ve also added original file access to the API responses for those that need it. For more information on the Viddler API see the Viddler Developers Web site.

Speaking of the API, you can now generate your own API key! No need to request an API key from the Viddler staff anymore (something we had a lot of trouble keeping up with the requests for). Now, just log into your account, go to your settings page, and generate an API key! It is now even easier to become a developer on top of Viddler’s platform.

With over 112 tickets in this release we also managed to fit in a number of bug fixes, more efficient processes (like reducing the amount of memory that our player uses), and have taken another step into fighting the spam messages we’ve all seen on Viddler. We’re actively working on version 2.47 already and we hope you enjoy some of these new changes!

Hello Viddlers! We’re updating the site to version 2.46. We’ll be down for a little while during this update. Stay tuned to this post or to Twitter for updates.

Viddler is at SXSW Interactive 2009!

Rachel (Community Support) and myself (Community Leader) will be frolicking in the streets and buildings of Austin, Texas, throughout the South by Southwest Interactive conference this year.

Last year billions of minutes of video was uploaded/imported via sxswvideos.com during and after the conference. Of course, this year we’d like to see zillions of minutes of video. That way people that can’t attend the event can still enjoy all awesome fun that goes on there. Okay, nothing is like being at an event, but video gets darn close!

Attendees: Make sure you add the tag ‘sxsw‘ to your videos to ensure they appear on sxswvideos.com for everyone to see in a single page. You can also amend the tag with various categories on the SXSW Videos site, such as Introduction — just add the tags ‘sxsw‘ & ‘sxswintroduction‘ for it to appear on the front page of sxswvideos.com and under the Introduction category. Now would be a good time to introduce yourself in a video. Go go go!

If you want to learn more about sxswvideos.com, just visit the great post ‘How to use SXSWVideos.com‘ that Colin wrote.

Lastly, follow @Viddler on Twitter for updates on our whereabouts!

We’ll see ya in the streets and at the shindigs, y’all!