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?
