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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.

Next Friday June 4th, Video Guy and myself will be joining a number of other businesses at the first Start To Sell Online seminar in Reading, Berkshire. The event is aimed at introducing traditional businesses to the world of selling online or for those who are already online but want to expand their operations.

vzaar are down on the agenda to talk about rich media and in particular how video can hep you sell online. Best to stick to what we know eh?!

What I really like is that after a 10 minutes Dragons Den style pitch, we get to meet each of the local businesses attending in what has been billed as a speed dating meets round table discussions. Should be interesting.

Other speakers include eBay, Royal Mail and Lloyds Banking Group and the whole event has been put together by the good man Chris Dawson of Tamebay fame and his cohort John Pemberton of Give Me Designer Clothes.

If you fancy coming along or would like to know more you can see details here

Ever wondered what dimension we encode our videos at or just how on earth do I add my video to my eBay listings via Turbo Lister? Well ponder no more as I’m pleased to say that we have spruced up the vzaar Help pages and added two new sections on Encoding and Embedding Guides.

The guides might prove particularly useful if you are new to both vzaar and the concept of adding video to your eBay listings or blog page. We have guides that cover the following tools and services:

eBay Tools - eBay's Sell Your Item Form - eBay’s Turbo Lister - eBay’s Blackthorne - eBay’s File Exchange - Auctiva - ChannelAdvisor - Seller Source Book - Spoonfeeder

Blogging Tools - Blogger.com - MoveableType.org - Typepad.com - Wordpress.org

All our help pages can be viewed in our Help Section

Since we launched we've had a number of requests asking for details on our Affiliate Programme. I suspect that most publishers, especially in the eBay sphere, expect all applications to offer such an incentive programme. Up until now we didn't.

So with the minimum of fanfare we'd like to tell you about our vzaar Affiliate Programme that we will be trialing from today. We are looking for a handful of publishers to invite into the programme which will initially last 90 days at which point the scheme will be reviewed.

For the launch we intend to keep things quite simple. Here are some of the main points:

• Publisher fees available from $3 to $200 per user depending on package signed up to
• Payments to be made via PayPal
• Buttons to be made available to publisher on acceptance into the programme

If the chance to earn some extra revenues appeals and you regularly attract the type of business or eBay seller we're looking for then please email me with your name and vzaar user name and I'll be in touch with further details.

Small change, small price. When we make any changes to our product no matter how big or how small we give it much thought and consideration. Often there is a split in the team and it usually becomes a huge debate that can last days or even weeks. One thing that is never debated is our objective and that is providing a service that offers remarkable value. The challenge we faced with this change is balancing the offer of our current Free package with our bottom line. Yes I am afraid in the end it all comes down to dollars and sense. So after much debate and thought we have made a change that we feel still meets our objective and makes sense.

Today we are announcing a new package called Lite. It costs $5.00 a month and you get 2GB of video bandwidth for that and access to the video privacy feature and multi size players.

For those familiar with vzaar you will say that this is more of a shift in products and you would be right. We have essentially created a new product by reducing the monthly video bandwidth for Free users from 2GB to 1GB and created a new package to fit the gap between 1GB and 2GB.

Here is the reason why we did this. No fluff just the facts pure and simple. When we first created the Free package we had no real user activity data to go by so it was created by making assumptions on what we thought the average user would use. The only real basis was the model; we wanted to offer a Freemimum structure so users could use a free service as a opposed to a free trial of a service that lasted 30 days. Our Free service is forever, as long as you stay within your monthly 1GB allowance.(and we don’t go changing it again, we won’t I promise). We now have real data based on users activity and usage and the data tells us that 2GB is too much to give away for Free. We are committed to offering great value and we fell all our packakages offer great value. The player plays no adverts, has no links at the end, just your content. We hope you feel the same way.

So that’s the reason why we have made this change. We do hope that you will continue to use our service. As usual we are happy to talk or email so please get in touch or comment below.

We are always listening to our users and much of what they say is discussed in our weekly product meetings. What we think people want is not necessarily what people want, and what people want is not necessarily what they need. So we try and determine what the latter is before we develop the feature.

Today we are officially announcing the release of a feature that should make our customers smile. It’s not totally remarkable but it is I think a small step in the right direction. Multi Size Video Players are here. It’s a pretty straight forward feature and it works like this.

1. Before you upload a video to vzaar select the video player size.
2. That’s it! I said it was straight forward.

What’s really remarkable is that none of the other Big Gorillas in the video hosting space offer this service. Our customers have been asking for it and at one of our meetings a few weeks back we decided to build the option. We felt it was something our customers needed and now it’s ready. (Thanks to Adrian, Mauricio, Agata, Pawel & co.)

What’s also cool (not remarkable) about this feature is, when you select a size, (Small, Medium, Large or Original) we encode the actual video file to those dimensions (so that we can ensure the best video quality). Sure you can take the video embed code from any video sharing site (like YouTube) and adjust the dimensions in the HTML embed code, but this just stretches the content, and you lose quality. By encoding the actual video file itself at the dimensions you specify , we ensuring the best possible quality.

We also encode the video at the source aspect ratio. Here is what I mean: Video comes in several aspect ratios. The two main ones we see are wide-screen (16:9) and standard (4:3). When you select a player size before you upload, we then encode the video making sure we retain the aspect ratio of your source video. So for example, if you have a video shot on a digital (photo) camera chances are it’s in 4:3, and if you chose the large player, we will create a large 4:3 video player for that video. If however you shot it on say a Mini HD, which shoots in 16:9, we would create a large video at 16:9.

This means the video is using all of the player’s real estate. This avoids playing standard videos in wide-screen players with black bars down the side (or vice-a-versa with black bars on the top of a widescreen player). Remember the days, before you bought your wide-screen TV, watching new wide-screen movies on your old TV. There was all that unused space. Well, you won’t find that on our players. We actually encode all video aspect ratios), not just 4:3 and 16:9. So if you video is in an unusual format (we see a few 5:4s or anamorphic sizes on occasion), don’t worry. We’ll keep the width set to one of our sizes and ensure the height such that your source aspect ratio is preserved.

We offer four sizes to select from one of which is “original”. The original options encodes (and displays) the video in a player size that is equal to the original size of the video shot. So if you upload a video where you particularly want the height and width not to change, this is for you. We have not had a lot of request for this, so we broke the rules a bit when it comes to what users need. However looking around, when we see users hosting videos themselves (very often screencasts) we see them in really large sizes, or unusual sizes. So if you are looking for video where the size is preserved, then this is for you.

Here is a screen shot of the new player sizes we now offer. You can also click here to view some of our users most recent videos.

There’s quite a lot going on at vzaar HQ this week so I thought a quick news round up might be in order.

vzaar to appear at ChannelAdvisor Catalyst event - Mar 30th and 31st

vzaar will be attending and presenting at the annual ChannelAdvisor best practice seminar, Catalyst, to be held at The Brewery, Chiswell Street, London. We were there last year when video for commerce was still in its infancy and we are pleased to be attending again where amongst other things we’ll be joining the debate on *Turning Browsers into Buyers - Technology to Maximise Conversions *

You can see the full agenda here and if you fancy attending, ChannelAdvisor are currently auctioning off a pair of tickets for charity. You can bid for it on eBay here

vzaar to feature on Internet Sellers Resource workshop - Friday 27th March

Join me and the wonderful Cindy Shelby as I take her readers through a live demonstration of the vzaar service. Further details on the live event will be posted on her Web Sellers Circle site.

Support Kim Kardashian’s Closet Sale!

American celebrity, socialite, model and some time actress, Kim Kardashian, is auctioning her clothes on eBay for charity and in particular the Dream Foundation. Rather fantastically, Kim is also using vzaar video so that she can address all the bidders personally. Check out her personal message below.

If you fancy some fancy second hand clothes then place a bid on eBay here. The auctions are being managed by our good friends at AuctionCause.

In a couple of weeks you will soon be able to select what size video player you want. This selection will be made on the upload page, and you will be able to select from 3 sizes: small, medium, and large. This is an example of what the widescreen large video player will look like.

So some great news emerging from the vzaar lab. This week we’ll be launching some new functionality that will give users more insight into their vzaar account. In short these include:

Bandwidth Monitoring
vzaar users will be able to see just how much bandwidth their videos are consuming on a monthly basis by logging into My vzaar > My account where you will see a summary a little like this:

The beauty of this is that you can now accurately gauge which package you need to be on as your videos get more and more plays across the Internet. You can also see at what point bandwidth peaks and how many views this amounts to in total across the month - just the first of many analytical improvements we have in mind.

Account Details
Since changing our player to one that works on multiple platforms, it has not remained essential for all vzaar users to have an eBay ID. With that in mind, we are now offering all users the chance to set up a vzaar username to log in with. This will default, where appropriate, to your eBay User ID but can be changed at any point in My vzaar > my settings. Plus, in cases where you change your eBay User ID you can now easily update our system with your new ID at a click of a button so that we continue to make it as easy as possible for adding video to your eBay listings.

The eagle eyed amongst you might have noticed some rather radical changes to the vzaar video player of late, so let us explain some of the thinking behind the new functionality.

Where’s all the eBay stuff gone?

By far and away the most commonly asked question at vzaar HQ from businesses was “Can I add this video to my own website?” so we sat up, listened, got out the wipeboard and made some changes.

Whilst the eBay features such as Bid Now and Feedback that adorned our original player were very popular on eBay they were holding us, and most importantly you back, and so we’ve simply removed them.

That’s great but what does that mean?

Well it means the that your video player can now be embedded on any website on the Internet. A bit like opening the flood gates. Now there is no reason not to market your merchandise on your own website, blogs or forums or any other marketplace on which you sell.

What else have you changed?

For paying users (Bronze and above) we’ve also taken the vzaar branding out of the player. We understand that businesses don’t necessarily want to carry someone else’s brand when selling something and so we are offering those that pay for the vzaar service an unbranded player. The asset is, and remains, the video itself.

To sign up for the non-branded player please log in and visit the Packages page here

Sounds cool, can I see an example please?

Here you go…

At the moment that’s it for our player until 2009. Our video coder is really tired and he is already planning his holidays but we’d love to hear what other features and functions your business desires. To do so simply drop us a line here