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Another week, another new feature for our users to enjoy!

This time we’ve been playing around with new ideas on allowing users to increase the syndication of their video content. We already offer enable users to submit their content to Google search results with Search Enhancer and now by adding Video Podcasting, customers will be able to watch and consume your videos through iTunes or mobile devices such as the iPhone or the iPod.

A simple feature to use, vzaar provides all paying customers, with a simple RSS feed that when clicked will fire up iTunes on the customer’s device and automatically download your latest feed of videos in mp4 format. The customer will then be able to play and view those videos either directly through iTunes or by copying that content across to their iPhone, iPod or iTouch. That means video on the go - cool eh?!

Detailed instructions on how to use this feature can be seen here.

Submitting Your Podcast to iTunes

If you want to submit your video feed to the iTunes library then that is also possible. You can follow steps on how to do this here.

Technical Notes

1. The videos will be downloaded in mp4 format.
2. The customer will now have a saved copy of your video on their PC.
3. Different Apple products (ie iPhone, Apple TV etc) have different specifications for viewing video. It is therefore possible that certain versions of your video, for example a HD video, or a video of a certain size, will not play. You can review these specifications, product by product here.

Following on from last week’s post on the launch of our Domain Control feature I wanted to share some further insight into how it works so you can decide if its worth turning on.

So What Exactly Is Domain Control?

If we turn to Wikipedia then they tell us that…

Individual Internet host computers use domain names as host identifiers, or hostnames. Hostnames are the leaf labels in the domain name system usually without further subordinate domain name space. Hostnames appear as a component in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for Internet resources such as web sites (e.g., en.wikipedia.org).

What? Well in other words if your website is hosted on a specific domain (e.g. vzaar.com) then it is possible to ensure your videos will only play on the domain (and any variant of this domain). So if you don’t want your videos to appear on other websites, and in doing so have greater control over who can and who can’t see your videos, then you’ll want to consider using this feature. If embedded on any other website, the viewer will see a simple message that looks like this:

I Sell On eBay?

If you have your own website, and sell on eBay, I would recommend that you do not use this option as you will want to ensure that your videos play across all the eBay domains (.com, .co.uk, .de etc)

Ok, So How Do I Turn This On?

Simple. Head over to your vzaar Settings Page and you’ll see a Domain Control box. In there simply enter your business website domain (e.g. www.mywebsite.com). Please note that you do not need to enter the http://

Save this and we’ll instantly ensure your videos can only be played on the web domain selected. It is that easy.

• Read our Help Page on Domain Control
  
• See our Features Page on Domain Control

The team have been busy bringing to life a series of new features designed to improve the management of your videos. Whilst there is still some tweaking to be done with the UI, we wanted to get these out there as overall they improve the user experience and it can never hurt to get some real time feedback. So let me introduce to you…

Video Analytics - beta
Understanding who is watching your video, when they are watching and significantly where is the need of many video marketeers. That’s why we have utilised the power of Google to now enable users to track the activity on their videos via their own Google Anlaytics account.

By adding your unique Analytics Tracking Code ID (e.g. UA-#######-#) vzaar will tie your account to your vzaar videos and you can track the activity of those in real time from within your Google Analytics admin panel. This feature is very much in beta at the moment. There are still further improvements for us to make but for the time being paying customers are free to test the feature.

End Screen Text
This one snuck in under the radar last week and its a neat little feature that gives the video owner a little bit more control over the final frame of their video. Where we currently serve a simple Replay button, the video owner can now add their own supporting text and web link. A simple add, but one that offers the owner a little more control over their viewer’s next step. Do they send them to the shopping cart, to a survey or perhaps a page of supporting information relating to the video just viewed.

More on our End Screen Text feature can be read here

Domain Control
With more and more content being created by businesses its important you control who can and perhaps who can’t watch your videos. Not only so that you can perhaps control the type of audience that is driving your bandwidth consumption (a key component of our business model) but also so that you can protect against the unauthorised distribution of your content. Perfect for company intranets or cases where you want to ensure a select community only can view your video, domain control allows the video owner to dictate which web domain (e.g. http://mywebsite.com) a video can only be played on.

All these new features you will find in the vzaar Settings Page.

Bulk Uploader - alpha
We know that some businesses want to upload video to their account en mass. Time is money. Yep we get it. So here is our very first version of our bulk video uploader. In alpha, it means you can now queue and upload a number of videos in one go. At the moment you can add titles to these videos whilst they load but you can only select one player size for all. That is something that we’ll be looking to address in the next iteration of the uploader.

Click here to test the bulk uploader

We are looking for a highly motivated junior web designer to join our small but vibrant and cutting edge online video service team. We are growing and our lead designer needs support as the business gather pace. You will be passionate about all things Internet, design and technology.

You will be working alongside the lead designer in order to take the business forward. Work on interface design, front end development (HTML and CSS), banners, HTML email campaigns and some flash are all part of it.

The ideal candidate will have previous commercial experience in web design (preferably commercial), the ability to translate a brief into design solutions with an eye to later build it to web standards. We also expect to see current / past work examples and URLs of such.

We are relaxed but professional. We make things happen individually and collectively. We have a diverse culture in the office and often debate what to put on Spotify and LastFM.

Core Development skills
- HTML
- CSS
- Testing
- Ability to write standards compliant code by hand (i.e. not using dreamweaver)

Core Design Skills
- Visual communication design
- Interface design (Websites)
- An eye for good information architecture and usability
- Banners
- Email HTML templates

Beneficial skills but not essential
- Javascript
- JS frameworks (prototype, Scriptaculous, jQuery)
- Flash

Remuneration and package
- 20k to 25k, depending on experience
- 25 days vacation per year

Please also include
- CV
- 2 to 3 examples of your work (preferable links to live sites, but attached examples or portfolios acceptable too)
- List of 3 of your favourite design or development blogs
- Cover letter of why you want to work for vzaar

All applications to jobs at vzaar.com, subject line: Web Designer Role

We are pleased to announce today the launch of our new video thumbnail feature - available to all vzaar customers.

Called Thumbnail Picker, the feature allows you to pick, video by video, a thumbnail from the video to act as the opening video image (displayed before play is hit). Up until today, vzaar had generated a thumbnail from the 25th frame which is approximately one second into the video. This new feature means you can now pick any image from any part of the video. Cool eh?

How do I update my thumbnails?

1. Log into vzaar and pick your video from your My Videos page by clicking the Manage button.
2. Scroll through the video to the frame you want as your thumbnail and make a note of the number of seconds into the video that frame appears at.
3. Enter those seconds into the thumbnail generator feature to the right hand side and hit the generate button.

Can I pick a default thumbnail?

Yes you can. In your settings page, you can select a default time (in seconds) and vzaar will automatically generate the thumbnail for all future videos uploaded based on that time. Needless to say you can still amend any video thumbnail uploaded individually.

vzaar will automatically set that to be the thumbnail. If you select 0 seconds then the system will pick the 1st frame.

Please note that it may take several minutes for the previous thumbnail to be cleared from the cache. The thumbnail will update automatically when it occurs.

Brightcove has always been considered the expensive online video platform boasting large media companies as customers who want rich syndication and monetisation tools. In 2007 when vzaar entered the online video platform market, we didn’t consider Brightcove to be our competition. They were high end, the big boys catering to the needs of enterprise companies who had massive video inventories and remits to monetise them, and we were low end providing smaller forward thinking companies with a simple and easy to use video service allowing them to merchandise their products or services. In other words, we were at the opposite ends of the market. This however is no longer with their recent remarkable announcement.

November 2009—Brightcove announce Brightcove 4 and with that Brightcove Express targeting companies that don’t have the budget to spend $6,000 a year for its “Professional” packages. The starting price on this new package is $99/month with no annual contract. You can read the actual press release here

This announcement represents a milestone for online video as we know it. Brightcove is the leading online video platform, and their arrival to the mid section of the market place means that video has arrived and is being embraced by small and medium sized online businesses. It means that online business who are using video are becoming more mainstream and this has been a long time coming. We welcome their arrival, competition is good, driving innovation and the end users are and will be the beneficiaries of this. Their presence “on our patch” is a good thing. It means more businesses are using online video platforms and they are not just at the top end of the market.

To see more information on their offering go here, and if you are interested in comparing vzaar’s offering versus theirs go here.

We reckon we are a good alternative to Brightcove, because our service is focused on you. Our philosophy at vzaar is the video is the ad and our users want an easy to use service.

If you need to monetise your video with ads, go to Brightcove. They have industry leading solutions for this. If you do not have the need to monetise your video content and want an intuitive service then please consider vzaar.

Some interesting findings from a report commissioned by TurnHere * came to our attention this week. All in all it serves to reinforce that online video is going to be the number one marketing tactic in 2010 for businesses and agencies looking to expand the success of their online activities.

Some of the highlights include:

• 90.7% of respondents are likely (>50%) or highly-likely (>75%) to use online video in their marketing efforts in the next 12 months
• 57.3% of respondents have created branded video content for the Web while 38.7% have created editorial video content
• 40% of respondents have used video for product or service demos and 37.3% have used video for customer or employee testimonials
• Those that chose not to use online video cited cost (66.7%) and lack of clear ROI (33%) measures as the top two reasons

The results really point to a number of things that many of us in the industry have been working on for some time. First things first, it is clear that the cost of video production and video streaming needs to come down to make it initially attractive and then secondly implementable for businesses.

Continued development in analytics and the measurement of video needs to be made available to businesses although I think employers of video need to take some personal responsibility here given the number of tools (think Google Analytics) that already reside online.

Finally it is not just product related videos that are the content of choice. With so many online sites selling services or simply access to information this really is the time of the talking head. At vzaar we’ve witnessed that first hand with a sharp rise in businesses, parties, organisations and groups using video to disseminate messages, coaching and online tutorials. The sheer range of video types will only continue to expand.

Overall the report confirms that 2010 will be another huge year for online video and that businesses need to think quickly about their ov strategy. Whereas before the question was “Have you considered video?”, today it very much has become “Are you ready for video?”

• The survey participants are marketing decision makers at both brands and agencies ranging from small boutique firms to publicly traded, Fortune 500 companies.

In the last week we were delighted to see vzaar’s video solution picked to host and stream video content for Trebor Mint’s latest product launch, Trebor Minty Gum.

In the advert, Clinton, a trainee at Trebor, manages to invent an idea for a new Trebor mint gum during a press conference in a TV spot promoting the brands first foray into the chewing-gum market.

The spot is the first of several installments, which all feature the mint people at Trebor in glorious video. The fully integrated television, print and online campaign has been created by ad agency Fallon

Fallon have gone with our unbranded, borderless player and have added a final flourish by picking the green player that gives the video that fresh minty appeal that is so essential for the campaign.

Ellie Bailey of Fallon told us

We selected vzaar for the quality of the video streaming available, their personal attention to clients and the customisability of the platform. For instance, we can skin all of our videos in Trebor-green players! The service is very easy to use, and unlike YouTube, I can ensure that the videos aren’t visible/searchable outside of our own websites.

Get a taster for the promotion on the official Minty Gum website or enjoy the initial TV advert here:

We today announce the release of our official eBay feature for the new Selling Manager Applications directory. From within My eBay, vzaar will now be available to hundreds of thousands of current subscribers to eBay’s Selling Manager tool.

The first approved Selling Manager application featuring video, the vzaar application allows eBay sellers to quickly and easily add video to their eBay listings for a more dynamic shopping experience. In a matter of seconds a seller subscribed to Selling Manager can now shoot a product video, upload that video to their vzaar application in My eBay and insert it into any live or scheduled eBay listing.

A year in the making, it is great to finally go live and to see our product integrated so tightly into eBay. As many of our current users know, eBay is in the company’s DNA - after all we built a service around the ability to add video to your listings - so to see our product live like this is truly exciting.

A large amount of the credit has to go our fabulous developers Applicake and in particular Matt. He has done a tremendous job in taking our vision for a seamless user experience and turning it into a fully functional application. Later this week, Matt will be joining us on the blog and sharing his own experiences on the release.

In the meantime, new users to the vzaar site who want to test the application can do so by logging into eBay.com and clicking on the Applications Tab in My eBay.

You can also review our new Help page for users of the SM Application.

You can also download our Press Release here:

Availability: Bronze packages and up
Location: myvzaar > settings page

vzaar now provides 8 player colours for you to choose from. These are shades of:

• Dark grey (default)
• Blue
• Red
• Green
• Yellow
• Pink
• Orange
• Brown

We have chosen the primary colours as well as the most popular ones so you are sure to find one that suits your brand. We love them all. No colour is better than another, it is all about choice and the context it is used. Together with no vzaar branding on the player we now offer unparalleled visual integration with your site, furthering our commitment to providing the best player for the business community: an easy to use, clean and professional looking video player


Preview your player with new colours in real time so you can decide which one works best for you before going live with it. Experiment with border off (no player border) so that your chosen colour scheme is applied to the player controls only. It adds a new dimension to the player. You may find that a color scheme you haven’t considered looks great with no border on the player.

I remember testing this functionality and couldn’t stop changing the colours to see the results. It was so much fun and inspiring.

Go create!

NOTE: if you change your player colour (my vzaar > settings page) to blue for example, all the videos you upload from then on will have a blue player. The same applies to the border on/off. Changing to a new colour will again apply to videos uploaded from then on. Existing videos will retain the settings you had at the time of uploading your videos.

You may have noticed that vzaar has a brand new, fresh look today - it is all part of a new release of player and user settings that are all designed to give you greater control over the presentation of your business videos.

All the following new features can be found in the Settings Page once logged in. From there you can decide which settings will become your default options when uploading new videos.

High Definition (HD) Player
vzaar now stream High Definition video files. That means today you can now choose to stream your video in small, medium and large players or really impress your customers with High Definition presentation.

Borderless Player
You can now opt to have your videos stream without the player border.

Border Colours
If you still want the border, you can now select from a variety of coloured borders so that you have the player that matches your website or company branding.

Auto Play
If you want your video to start automatically as soon as it is loaded then you’ll want to use the new Auto Play feature.

Brand Text
Instead of the plain, unbranded player, you can now choose to add your own branding text to the video. This will be displayed from the bottom left hand corner of the player. That text can also be directed to a website URL of your choosing (e.g. your own website)

We also now offer all users the chance to select the video and audio quality that matches your needs.

Video Quality - Standard FLV H.263
This option will decrease the bit rate of the video and the overall file size. If you are seeking to reduce your monthly video bandwidth then this option is recommended.

Video Quality - High MP4 H.264
This option has a higher bit rate which leads to an overall larger file size but it offers the highest video quality. When uploading HD content you must select this option.

Audio Quality - Standard 128kbps
This is the recommended audio option which is sufficient for most videos and is comparable to a standard mp3 quality.

Audio Quality - High 256kbps
If you are looking for high quality audio then select this option.

If you are on the Free or Lite packages you can upgrade to these features instantly by logging in at our Pricing Page.

In addition there are a host of other small tweaks and changes aimed at ever improving the user experience. We’ve added file sizes to all uploaded videos, you now have a more detailed accounts and usage page and its possible to now sort videos by date as well as by views and title.

In the coming week the team will focus in more detail on each of these new features but for the meantime we really hope you enjoy the new look and feel to your vzaar videos. If you have any questions or feedback please don’t hesitate to contact us via the new look Contact Form.

Although we are deeply in love with video here at vzaar we’ve had a number of requests of late for audio to be added to our list of compatible file types. Well over the weekend, we made the necessary change, which now means you can now stream sound files in mp3 format.

Perfect if you have

• an audio file you want to share (perhaps you are a musician and you want to show off your talents!)
• a podcast you want to share with your listeners
• a company jingle, advert or PR you want your buyers to listen to

Once uploaded, vzaar return the file in the following player. The size of player defaults to 334x86 pixels at present.