Tag Archives: video

Viddler, now with multi-user sign on »

December 11th, 2012

The Viddler Blog:

Decide who can access your dashboard, setup their own Viddler username and password, and choose what they will have access to in your account. Select who can view and/or manage certain videos or playlists, who can edit account or billing settings, and for those customers with sub-accounts, you can set permissions for accessing these accounts as well, which makes managing your content easier and more productive.

This is huge for publishing organizations that need to allow multiple people within one organization to upload, edit, or manage their video library. Even better, if a single organization has more than one Viddler account (say, for different publications or departments) – they can set up access to each of those sub-accounts as well. The importance of this feature can not be overstated.

Any company doing video publishing should take a serious look at using Viddler if they haven’t already.

The NYC soda ban explained »

September 19th, 2012

Speaking of Devour… Here is a video by filmaker Casey Neistat for The New York Times to help explain NYC’s recent ban on insanely large buckets of soda.

/via Devour.

 

PS. To Devour editor Larry Angel (if you’re reading this) – I’d love it if I didn’t have to hunt down the original URLs for these videos. Perhaps Devour could throw in a link to the original source (ie. YouTube or The New York Times) when appropriate?

Pete Rose: Here Now

May 22nd, 2012

A great short film about Pete Rose day-to-day.

I hired Pete Rose in Atlantic City in 2003 when I worked for a sports memorabilia company to sign autographs. Out of the 45 or so athletes I worked with during my time there, including many hall of famers and still-working athletes, Pete Rose was one of the nicest to work with. The other stand-out in the “nice guy department” was Joe Theismann.

/via John Gruber and Devour.

Viddler helps Foreigner to create an innovative online video contest

April 17th, 2012

There have been some pretty interesting milestones in the history of Viddler for the last 5+ years I’ve been on the team. This is one of them. We’re working with Foreigner of Waiting for a Girl Like You fame to help them bring a video contest online in a way that no other company could have.

I just unbuttoned the top two buttons on my shirt.

Made by Hand

April 8th, 2012

Working for a video-related startup for the past five plus years has given me the opportunity to see many ideas for episodic video content. Some great, some good, some bad. I’ve had a few dozen of my own.

One of my ideas was to create a video show about everything but the Internet or technology. For a long time there was a glut, and I’m sure there still is, of video podcasts about tech. I was going to call it “5 minutes about something else”. But, who has the time?

That’s why I’m happy to link to Made by Hand a series of short films (sounds much better than video podcast, doesn’t it?) about the people that make the stuff we use. Awesome.

Why the Louis C.K. “experiment” will not work again

December 27th, 2011

At least, not in the same way. Andrew Mayne wrote on Google+:

“Much of the sales were generated by the news sites and blogs covering the story. This works great once, but is hard to repeat it. Other comedians, even established ones aren’t going to get as lucky. The publicity was a black swan event. We can’t draw any conclusions from it about how it will play out in the future.”

I agree with this. We’ve all seen it before – in different ways – that when someone is doing something “all new” there is a bunch of news about how they are taking a risk and doing something differently. Notice how most of the news regarding Louis’s video was about how it is new, how it is different, and how much money it made. The news wasn’t about how funny the special was.

I’m not saying the special wasn’t funny. Louis is consistently hilarious anytime I’ve seen him in just about anything. But his act wasn’t what made waves with the media over the last few weeks. It was because he spun this in a way that made everyone believe he was doing something different. And that is, as Mayne pointed out, impossible to repeat.

BTW, what Louis did was nothing different or new. It was new and a bit different for a relatively well established comedian to pay for and distribute their own special via the web – all without charging the customers too much, without putting undue restrictions on the use of the product, and without spamming the people that bought it with email. But this model has worked pretty well for a lot of media on the web including music. (think, Nine-Inch-Nails) But that doesn’t matter. It was new for someone like him to do something like that and he deserves credit for taking the chance that it would have flopped.

I’m fairly certain that Louis is popular enough that, if he should do another special like this, that he’ll sell enough copies to cover his costs within the first few days like he did this time. But it won’t be because the way he’s distributing it is new. It will because people love Louis. It will be because its great and well worth the cost. And those are very good reasons.

So, on the whole, we learned from this experiment something we’ve always known; new, novel ideas that are well executed, inexpensive, of decent quality, and put the customer’s interests first will generally do very well.

Twitvid turning into a social network?

December 13th, 2011

File this under “I doubt this will work.”

Something must have told the Twitvid team that this is a logical direction to take Twitvid but I don’t see it. Broad category social networks have, more or less, been done and will, more than likely, stay the same as they are now for a long time. The best way to compete in social networking is by creating niche communities. Broad category video sharing is simply not niche enough to cut out a following.

Twitvid was and should have been a utility for sharing videos via Twitter since Twitter doesn’t currently allow that. I’m sure Twitter Photos, which all but negated the need for Twitpic and others, scared Twitvid into this pivot. But what would have been even more sensible is to, like Photobucket, make a deal with Twitter to handle their official service in an unobtrusively and mutually beneficial way.

Millions have used Twitvid and I’m sure many will continue to. However, I’ll go on record as saying that not many of those people will use these new features on Twitvid. I think this move sounds the death knell for Twitvid.

The Arc Touch Mouse and talent inside of Microsoft

October 12th, 2011

There is a lot of talent inside of Microsoft. It is everything that happens above the talent that inhibits that talent’s ability to make really great things.

While the Arc Touch Mouse is very, very interesting and seemingly well done it is still based off an old “mouse” (read: move around your desk and move the pointer) paradigm. The multitouch touchpad from Apple is, in my opinion, much better and more forward-thinking because it is getting us closer and closer to having all touch-based interfaces for our computing devices. It is why I switched from using a mouse. I never want a mouse again.

I don’t want to take anything away from the people that worked on this mouse at Microsoft… but I’d like to know if Microsoft would have let them work as hard and long on creating a next generation touch device rather than only a slimmer mouse. And then actually be able to ship it.