Syndication Player Review: Revver, AtomFilms, Veoh, YouTube, Stage6

If you are thinking about distributing original video content online, you will quickly realise that your profit wherever it comes from relies on as many people seeing the video as possible. That's were syndication comes in. Sites like Revver, AtomFilms, YouTube, Veoh and Stage6 are betting their futures on the syndication model and have developed flash based players that can be easily embedded in any website. But how do these players stack up?

Revver's flash player has enjoyed a resent upgrade which included a new full screen mode. The player can be launched with both <EMBED> and <SCRIPT> tags supplyed by revver. It is clean and fast loading, and with some tinkering if scales well. It should be mentioned that the player doesn't work well with MySpace and you will need to use a work around to post videos with the revver player.

YouTube's flash player is the benchmark for all the entire "shared video" p henomenon. It has full screen capability, volume control, a timecode window, it is scalable and has a simple grey skin. The player easily embeds (using <EMBED> tags) in any website or social networking site.

AtonFilm's player has a preview function letting the viewer skip the pre-roll ads for a brief glimps of what the video is like. But in general the player small, dull and not all that impressive. There is no full screen functionallity, but the share functions are embeded in the player. For one of the best and longest running video sites out there, you'd expect more from their player.

Veoh's player is billed as high quality and is a slick black. It has full screen capability and build-in sharing tools. Although the player is capable if high quality video (with rather large file sizes), Veoh does not have their own encoding software, so the quality of the videos are relient on the codec used to create the root file.

Stage6 is DIVX.com's attempt at a Youtuble like video sharing service, but is built on the divx encoding engine that has been at the forfront of pirated video via P2P and bitTorrent distribution technology. Until recently Stage6 was the site with the best quality pirated television on the net, but with the ink on recent distribution deals still drying DIVX has pulled all illigal content over the past few weeks and the entire service for an upgrade this week.

We'll have to wait to see their over all syndication strategy, but the player on the old site was light years ahead of the compitition. It has both windowed and fullscreen modes, loads quickly, and streams smoothly. For $20 you can buy their encoding software giving your videos syndication opportunities at DVD quality. File sizes for the divx codec have always been impressively small (under 700 MB per 2 hour movie, iTunes recent upgrade would require 3GB for the same file). We'll write an update when the new service is launched, but as it is right now, the Stage6 divx player is the most promising and highest quality player on the net.