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.

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.

Revver the next Google purchase, or maybe Stage6?

Google has build an empire on buying up the best innovations and integrating them into a vast advertising network. Providing free content and making billions for it. In a lot of ways Revver has what Google wants, a better player, CPC based auto insertion ad technology, and a pile of copy-right responsible content.

At T-Cast, we like the Revver model and wish them success. But there are problems with the things as they are. There is still no analytic reporting for video syndication and the revenue from those clicks is not broken down for either the syndicator or the content producer. Value of clicks are falling, but then are still better than most of the adwords content market with pay-per-click of $0.12 to $0.27.

It would seem to be smarter for the content producer to sell their own advertising, and the T-Cast producers asked Stage6's Divx support team for just such an opportunity only to be disappointed with the response. No question that the Divx authoring software is the best encoding software out there for under $50, and the Stage6.com site has proven that the player is post-roll clickable. Content producers could be running their own advertising campaigns off a wide variety of CPC, CPM and CPA advertising networks, and Divx HD quality video would be everywhere. Stage6 could be Revver for the masses.

Google needs to figure this out or it could get away from them. And there are other divx encoders out there. One of these companies has to put internet video syndication and dynamic advertising together before some hacker does.

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.