Splashcast and StuffWeLike XOXO

You may not have ever heard of a little web 2.0 company called Splashcast, but they’ve had a great impact on StuffWeLike.com. After reading the official statement about Splashcast shutting down, I’d like to take this time to walk down memory lane and reflect on our history together.

Since StuffWeLike’s inception, we’ve been producing random videos and placing them on our website. Back in 2002-2003 like most websites we had a bunch of Quicktime files that were slow to load. When a little website named YouTube.com came around, I really didn’t get it. Why would I post my own content on another website? It was clear that at some point there had got to be a better solution to allowing people to view our content without having to wait thirty minutes to download a video.

I originally heard about Splashcast in 2007 when I was reading some tech magazine. Splashcast offered a free way to organize not only video content, but text, images, and sound. The possibilities to provide a great multimedia entertainment channel were endless so I jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, I became so attached to this idea that I radically changed the essence of StuffWeLike forever.

In late February 2007, within three days from concept to final product StuffWeLike morphed into a blog format. We integrated the Splashcast player via an iframe and placed it at the top of the website. In theory users could come to the website and surf around on the website while they are listening to music or watching a video. We really wanted to get rid of the idea of being a static website especially since our previous website formats were all HTML based.

StuffWeLike blog version 1

Of course at the time not everyone liked the blog as you can see in the video below.

In this episode of the StuffWeLike Podcast, released in April 2007, we show off the new blog design and our Splashcast player. For whatever reason the co-host Mark Gravender expresses his issue with StuffWeLike becoming a blog.

We had a lot of exciting times exploring what type of content we could add onto the player. We had film and video game trailers, video game soundtracks, news articles, and podcast to name a few of our shows. One of the coolest content providers was The Fatman. He was the composer for the classic full-motion video game The 7th Guest.

We had plenty of independent music artists that allowed us to also put up their music such as Canon, Puff and the Pillpoppers, and Scarlatti Tilt.

Eventually the player itself received its own name called The Pipeline. We spent a lot of time in our dorm rooms trying to come up with a good name and logo to go along with it. A major thanks goes out to Tessa Pahkamaa for the art design!

StuffWeLike Splashcast designs

As time went on, we partnered up with several websites that agreed to embed The Pipeline onto their own website. These affiliates included: XboxLiveAddicts.co.uk, TerrorBase.com, VG-Reloaded.com, NewGenGamers.com, GamersDailyNews.com, GameThinker.com, TheSuperSoldiers.com, Advance-Gamers.com.

In July 2007 the player became an official application on Facebook.

In September we did a fun event that allowed anyone to submit photos and videos of their experience waiting in line for Halo 3. We received tons of photos across the US. You can see a quick promotion for this at the end of our own Halo 3 launch experience:

In early March 2008 The Pipeline received a new design. This time the player included a chrome design with a chat room.

StuffWeLike Chrome Splashcast player

Ultimately that was one of the last things that we did with Splashcast. It’s pretty sad to see a company that became very involved with StuffWeLike close shop, but sometimes that’s just how things roll.

Many thanks to the Splashcast team and I hope that they all do something just as cool in the future!

Author: DaveWeLike

I'm the editor of StuffWeLike.com.

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