July 15th, 2008
If you watch WLTV, you know this chalk board.
Tag Archives: winelibrarytv
WineLibrary TV featured on the iTunes Music Store
July 1st, 2008
Today is a great day for Vayniacs! Â Wine Library TV, one of the very few podcasts I’ve been subscribed to since nearly day-one, is featured on the front page of the iTunes Music Store!
I remember when the show was featured on the Podcast area of the iTunes Music Store, which lead to a sizable increase in traffic and the number of subscribers to both Wine Library TV’s Web site but also their Viddler account. Â I bet this will be even better.
Congrats to the Wine Library TV crew!
“We just posted loads of clips all over the freakin’ place!”
April 1st, 2008
Ever since Viddler announced that Tubemogul now supported Viddler as a distribution point, we’ve been seeing this more and more. People that upload their video to every single video sharing site in order to gain exposure for their show, product, etc. etc.
I get the point. I see the strategy. And, I can’t really blame anyone for spreading their work all over the place in order to get exposure from each of the communities (or audiences as some like to call them) that each of these services have worked very hard to foster.
But is this strategy a good one? Is the benefit great enough to actually recommend this type of marketing? I don’t believe it is, but I’m willing to learn otherwise.
WineLibraryTV is obviously one of the flagship video podcasts that uses the Viddler player. Each episode, since they are embedded on the show’s main Web site, get thousands if not tens of thousands of views. These numbers do not directly reflect the entire audience, since they offer their shows also in Quicktime format for playing within iTunes, iPod, etc. From what I’ve been able to research – the number of people that download the Quicktime format of the show far exceed the number of people that watch the show in the Viddler player.
All of that being said; WineLibraryTV still uploads their videos to YouTube (and maybe other sites too?). Perhaps the strategy here is to, hopefully, get some viewers through YouTube back to their main site. This strategy seems to make sense, but when you look at their YouTube account you see that most episodes only have around 100 views on them. In the realm of WineLibraryTV, that is nothing.
But, some may say “Why not? It doesn’t hurt!”. This might be true, and one could also argue that with services like TubeMogul, it is downright easy. But, one has to ask themselves if they’d rather spread themselves out all over the Internet, or be able to strictly control their brand.
As you know, I’ve been putting together a strategy of “Bringing it all together” wherein I’m starting to take much more control over what I “put out there” and how it is displayed, shared, etc. So perhaps my opinion is skewed and I’m missing something – but really – I feel that if someone’s content is good enough, it won’t matter where they put it. People will come, watch, and interact.
This post was prompted by my seeing this: “We just posted loads of clips all over the freakin’ place!“. When I loaded up the list of places and videos and the links to each, I was amazed (ok, I even LOLed a little). I’m sitting here wondering if this strategy has worked for them or not. Wondering if it was worth the effort or – if it diluted their brand at all.
Maybe I’ll have to do some further research through interviewing people that have done both. Ze Frank comes to mind as someone that has controlled his brand extremely well (in my opinion). Perhaps I’ll ask him and someone who has spread themselves all over to see if either strategy has its own set of benefits.
I’m eager to learn. Opinions?
The Independents Hall Grand Opening Party
September 6th, 2007
Arriving in Philadelphia on September 1st, quite possibly one of the nicest days I’ve experienced all year, I knew I was in for something special. Bright blue skies filled with cool, crisp late summer air – it was the type of weather that you remember for quite awhile.
Early Saturday at Indy Hall
View more photos from Indy Hall.
Independents Hall is nested nicely in Old City, two-floors above Strawberry Street (or what could be called an alley), and is now the venue for the future of coworking in Philadelphia. Spending the better part of the day there, on a Saturday, working with a few other people is a real joy. The space, the people, the weather – all factors in inspiring productivity.
My main reason for coming to Independents Hall on this day was to be part of the judging panel for the Viddler MealToday contest and to use the space’s grand opening party as the backdrop for the announcement of its winner. Alex Hillman, and the rest of the coworkers at Indy Hall, were all extremely accommodating – allowing us to take over a few of their desks for the day, a good portion of their second floor, their projector, and their board room. Really, we couldn’t have asked for better hosts.
I had a ball seeing all of the people in Philly again and had a great time judging MealTodays with Scott McNulty, Marisa McClellan, Rob Sandie, and Gary Vaynerchuk. We’ll be releasing a video later today We’ve released a video on the Viddler Spotlight (our blog), which shows what went on that night and that should give you a good glimpse into what it was like to be at Indy Hall’s party and to be judging the MealTodays.
With well over 100 people in attendance there is no doubt in Philadelphia’s interest in coworking and community (and probably champagne). Such support makes me both jealous and inspired to someday setup a coworking space further north of Philadelphia. But that won’t be until I have time to settle down.
If I didn’t get to say hi to you while in Philadelphia, sorry. I’ll be in again this weekend for Podcamp Philly.
One crazy day in Bethlehem
August 2nd, 2007
Yesterday was a huge day in the history of Viddler. So many different things ended up converging onto one another to end up creating one crazy day in Bethlehem. (Yes, I realize this sounds like a movie by Kevin Smith about the day Jesus was born.)
I knew I’d be going to ViddlerHQ to giveaway the second iPhone for the month of July. Giving away an iPhone is a production in and of itself. You have to prepare the entries. Get everything together to do a video “broadcast” to announce the winner and try to build a little hype by involving the community along the way. This alone is a pretty big thing to accomplish in a day.
My mobile setup – at the offices of Viddler
We weren’t certain that we’d be launching a brand new version of our site and our player on this same day until about the day before. Yesterday we launched a new player that, although aesthetically the same, takes advantage of an entirely new infrastructure that the Viddler team had been building for quite some time. Video playback and responsiveness should be vastly improved for most people, especially those that were viewing videos that had a high amount of traffic associated to them. We also managed to release Viddler Groups which allows our users to create their own little communities to add video and discussions to. I’ve personally been waiting with baited breath for Groups since before we launched Version 2.0 in April.
Rob working hard
While we were rolling out Groups we had a hiccup. I’m no system administrator (not by any stretch of the imagination), but from what I gather it wasn’t something we could avoid because we experienced a problem during a routine automatic upgrade process that happened to coincide with our update. I’ll let Rob, Kasper, and/or Todd elaborate on this if they feel the need to. We were able to restore everything fairly quickly once the problem was indentified and release groups with much success!
While one contest was ending, another one was beginning. Our MeToday contest in July was such a success that we wanted to do it again – so we came up with what I think is a natural extension to the MeToday contest – the MealToday contest. Just tell Viddler what you ate or drank today and you can win your choice of an iPhone or Canon TX1 HD camcorder. We’re running this contest with two of our favorite Viddlers WineLibraryTV and ForkYouTV for the entire month of August. We’re now planning an event in Philadelphia for September 1st to giveaway this prize in style!
To top off the day our very own Viddler Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV was scheduled to be on Late Night with Conan O’brien! How much more jammed packed and fun could one day get? After watching Gary’s few moments with Conan last night – I have to say he did an extraordinarily good job. We’re all so proud of the success that WineLibraryTV has worked so hard for and we’re sure this trend will continue.
So that was my day; how was yours?
This week at Viddler
January 14th, 2007
As some of you know I’ve joined the Viddler team for a month to help build up some of the community over there. It has been a fun first three days.
I wanted to give an overview of some of the things we were able to do this week as well as give a general synopsis of some of the things to come. Perhaps some of you can even help out a little.
It took me a little while to get familiar with their systems, but overall I like how they have things setup. Viddler uses many internal systems to not only monitor their service, but also to collaborate on various tasks and bug fixes. Viddler uses SVN, Trac, email, calendars, Skype, and a host of over little bits in order to keep up-to-date with each other and get things accomplished. Not surprisingly they also use Viddler to post videos of some of the new things they are doing, which they keep private, and then share those videos among the team.
Having some of the team here in Pennsylvania (Viddler HQ with a few people is in Bethlehem and I’m about an hour and half from there), some of the team is in Phoenix, Arizona, some in Poland, etc. I think the team does a really great job of keeping up with each other and they seem to get a lot of work accomplished.
After I got up-to-speed with all of their systems and got a feel for how Viddler wanted to start to bolster a really active community I wrote about how Viddler is going to smash down the wall between the team and Viddler’s users. And that is incredibly true. Viddler wants its users to become active, outspoken, and they will listen.
For the rest of the week we had some meetings with a few potential sponsors and partners to get some contests together which is starting to become really exciting. What better way is there to get a community excited than to start handing them cool stuff for using the service?! I can’t wait to get some of these contests going since I know they will be a huge hit, and I will have fun going through all of the submissions.
In between meetings and strategizing we were able to choose the week’s featured video which came from a couple of easy riders which I thought was some great video from the front of a motorcycle during a race in London. The diversity of the people, content, and videos that you find on Viddler is really refreshing. Rather than just having commercials, clips from TV, and clips of people doing stupid things (which Viddler has its full share of too), there is also a whole host of independently created content that I really enjoy.
Shortly after getting this video together we started some conversations with my good friend Gary from WineLibrary TV in order to full host a searchable backup of all of his episodes. There is some really exciting stuff that will be coming from this “partnership” not only in the form of content generation, searching, timed tags, etc. – but Wine Library’s community is incredibly active so we look forward to seeing some of their audience spill over into Viddler and becoming active in that community as well.
Friday came around too quickly and so we thought we’d have some Friday fun. Some things people try is amazing.
So after three days we’re making some serious strides. Not only is the entire development team making leaps and bounds in the area of video sharing online (trust me, you have not seen anything yet as I feel that Viddler will be the video sharing site of the future for professionals) but we’ve also started to see an upturn in the number of new users, videos, and overall traffic to the site. In only three days! Here is to hoping the trend continues.
If you are a video content producer, someone that puts on slideshows or demonstrations or screencasts, or just want to use your webcam to record a video to share with your family – please check out Viddler and see why I think it is or will become the best service available.
[tags]viddler, winelibrarytv, video, sharing, community, skype, trac, contests[/tags]
[slug]viddler-week-one[/slug]