What is Going on with Revver?? Should I be replacing my players???

If you've been in the game for a while you probably have a lot of Revver players out there in an ever increasingly vain attempt to earn money. Those days seem a distant memory. For the first time that we know of, EVERYTHING Revver went down. Quicktime, website, embedded players, forum, absolutely everything was down.

Logging in today, the site and players were back up and everything was working faster than it has in a while. With a "Scheduled Maintenance" message across every page. Maybe a revival is in the making, but the landscape is so changed you have to wonder what kind of business model they would be able to put together. The old one failed under its own success.

Two years ago Revver was the way of making money with video, offering $0.30 or more per click. I bet the spammers, scrapers and fraudsters had fun with that, but the problem was that their advertising inventory was skyrocketing while their advertiser's expectations where falling. Classic arbitrage collapse. Who wants to buy click ads that don't sell products at the other end.

But what is going on with Revver right now? And should I replace my players? I wish I had an answer for you. Its unlikely that they will be paying anything to content producers that would come close to the company's original vision. Is their technology still Hot. I'd say yes. Their players are solid, their transcoding is pro and they are still one of the few free services to be easily integrated with iTunes.

I don't think you need to feel bad swapping out players on under your control, if you want to do the work. They need to lower their bandwidth for a while, cement new relationships, and figure out a way to go up against the pirating sites on one side, and Hulu on the other.

In the mean times check out these other players:

Vimeo - sweet and simple, great transcoding, HD, and kind community
Dailymotion - Huge and likely to be a round a while, new HD players

Also remember Tubemogul makes video distribution easy, sending out to something like 24 videos sites at once. And analytics to boot :)

Player Review: Revver

Those of you who have been working with Revver’s video player and advertising network, will know how powerful the service’s syndication tools are and the upgraded Revver player puts it back on top of the online video game (at least now that Stage6 has closed its doors). The new player was release a couple of months back, first on their site then on the sites of their content producer’s and syndicators.

Be for we examine the benefits of the new player, its worth mentioning that 2007 was a difficult year on many fronts for Revver. Unable to sell enough advertising to properly service their massive video library, Revver abandoned their sales effort and turned to third party ad networks (first Adbrite, now Google Adsense). At the same time ad value for “video” and video related keywords fell sharply across the web making it very challenging for producer to create a higher standard of short form production.

The new player, and its slick black skin, incorporates a number of functions found in competitor players that greatly increase its viral capabilities. The player now has a “menu” button that provides information on the creator, embed code, email sharing and related videos which can be viewed in a list or on a thumbnail gallery. The player is highly customizable, including the ability to brand the player with your show’s logo. But at the root of it, the Revver player provides the same high quality video you’ve come to expect from this great service.

The complaints about the player are twofold and both relate to the advertising portion of the Revver network. Ads are now displayed as overlays along the bottom of the player, and at the end in a block of three ads. First, even if your viewer completes the video and sees both the overlay and the post roll adblock, the publisher gets credited for just one impression, not four. The ads are also accompanied with arrow buttons to allow the user the option of viewing more ads, but that also does not result in additional impressions. Second, if Adsense is driving the advertising within Revver videos, then why are those impressions not reported within our Adsense accounts? It is currently impossible to see how one video is doing in relation or user interaction with the advertising, a well developed feature of Adsense.

As a side note, revver has quietly mothballed its podcasting capability. While still offering the service, it is rare that ads are served into iTunes the way they once were. This is likely do to the ongoing debate about the compression formats used, and which should prevail. Web based catchers prefer flash video, while iTunes continues to push its quicktime H.264 iTV compression format. Fortunately video publishers still have a choice to use both formats within Revver driven RSS feeds.

Player Review: Blip.tv

Blip.tv has so many great features and vision for internet video, we at the T-Cast want so much to love them. But they aren't making it easy.

The user profile dashboard seems simple enough until you try to navigate, menu items come and go, and loop you around. On some screens you have two menus one in blue one in grey with the title "Express Goodness". Its all really not intuitive.

But our main complaint is with the Playlist/Showpage organization of the videos. Your show page plays most recent to oldest, which isn't great for most shows. If you use the syndicate feature at the top right, you can get embed code that reverses the order. But you better have uploaded them in order because there isn't any way to change it later. You'd think this would be where a playlist system would step in, but no. And that isn't its only shortcoming. To load the playlist with videos you have to go to each video and add it to the playlist. Once you have them all in there , you can adjust numbers to order them. But doing so doesn't effect the RSS syndication options at the bottom right of the playlist page.

Still their player is nice. Check out the embedded syndication tools like "Tell-a-Friend" "video series embed code" and "preset RSS syndication, including iTunes".



You also get a "pop-in" of the show data and other episodes (showpage order). The full screen looks great and their are a wide array of ad options you can control. The post-roll ads appear between each video in your channel are high quality television ads, and your view can choose to skip to the next video at any time.

The views and ad revenue seems to be comparable to the new Revver scheme where earnings are made on impressions. There are stats for clicks, but they didn't seem to earn. We have tried driving traffic to these videos yet, so we can't say if the earnings are better or worse on syndication.

All in all, a nice player. The site has great potential but needs a total overhaul, as does the playlist/showpage controls. The Analytics is good compared to Blip's competitors, but it would be better if the views and revenue charts and graphs were on the same page so you could compare them. Definitely a site to watch.

Blinkx AdHoc a Strong Alternative to Video Ad Insertion

Looking to squeeze a bit more advertising into your shared video offerings. Blinkx has a new easy solution, but does it work?

Blinkx is taking a different approach to their video advertising network. They are auto inserting contextual advertising into the shared embedded video from other hosting sites like YouTube, Revver, and Veoh. The process is so simple. You sign up for an account, which only requires your email address, a password and your paypal email. Then copy and paste the embed code from your favorite video hosting site and presto, Blinkx gives you a new embed code that will drive their advertising. You can choose to have the ads float over the top of the video or above video all together.

Blinkx states that the ads come from a variety of third party advertising networks providing CPM, CPC and CPA advertising, as well as Blinkx's own advertiser network which offers cost-per-click starting at $0.05. They don't say how much of that will end up with the publisher, but we'll find out and let you know in a future post.

On testing, no advertising was presented and it seemed to really slow down the video serving. Of the hosting sites tested only Stage6's embed code failed to sync with Blinkx's processes. Below are examples of the same video hosted on different sites displaying Blinkx advertising.

YouTube:

Revver:

Veoh:

If you notice any bugs when these videos stream, please leave a comment.

Veoh Player: One step forward two steps back

Even with rumors falling viewership, Veoh remains a viable player in the internet "shared video" market. And with the release of a sorely needed tech upgrade they are signaling a plan to continuing with the "Branded Player" model that is behind those quickly sinking statistics. No one really needs another "video player" to install on their system, and although the upgraded "Veoh Player" is a substantial improvement over its former offerings.

For those of you who watch pirated video on sites like TV-Links, will have noticed that a few months ago Veoh changed the playback of a large portion of their content to a 5 minute preview model, where you can watch 5 minutes then you have to load up the "Branded Veoh Player" to watch the rest. Now this was a pain because the old player forced the download of the entire video before playback, now you can stream the video in the player.

The main strategy that has allowed Veoh to remain viable has been its strong industry relationships. Those relationships have kept them out of court room even though they have continually failed to fulfill their promise to block pirated content through a "technological solution". But more troubling, they have continued to neglect the construction of a viable advertising network that would solve the dilemma those industry partners find themselves in (mainly that viewers want simple free internet television, but then how do you make money from that?). You can now see Google ads on the Veoh site. And then there are the Chinese who don't seem to care if Hollywood makes any money.

Veoh has toyed with the "digital video rental" model that was the core element of its branded player business model. But at this time we have still not been able to sign up for "Veoh Pro" as the form to do so either doesn't accept Non-US users or is just buggy.