Major Update – Coming Tomorrow! The Pipeline

If you read this blog, you’ve noticed that I’ve talked a lot about The Pipeline update. Yes… it’s coming… Doesn’t this all sound familiar?

Tomorrow, August 30th 2007 the world will be able to use the new player design!

Here’s a list of all the new features:

SplashCast - Player 2.0

1. Video, Audio, or Text Comments – For any item in a show, YOU can now record or upload a video or audio comment as well as leave a text comment.

2. Easier item navigation – We know that we have tons of shows (around 50) and that each show has a ton of items for everyone to watch. Navigating through all of this content has been somewhat of a nightmare. With thumbnail navigation and the corresponding item title you won’t have to load each item to figure out what it is!

3. Captions – The captions box displays the Name of each item in your show. As always, the player fades away after a few seconds, but if you prefer, you can always close the caption box while navigating through the items if desired.

4. Full Screen button – View the player in full screen mode.

5. Pause/Play button – Pause actually pauses everything now… even background music. This is a great feature for everyone watching our slide shows.

6. Send button – Email friends and family a link directly to your favorite item or to an entire show.

SplashCast - Follow Me


7. Follow Me – You can now receive email updates to when a show has been updated. By clicking the Info button on bottom right you can access the new “follow me” link.

The Pipeline v2.0 – Coming VERY VERY VERY SOON?

If you’ve been following this blog you’ve heard me talk about the new The Pipeline design that was supposed to be released a couple of weeks ago. Well it has taken more time, but I’m telling you it’s worth the wait. If you like or dislike the current design, get ready to be happy – very happy with the new design.

The StuffWeLike.com Toolbar

You know a website has jumped the shark when it has its own toolbar!I’m extatic to announce the very first StuffWeLike.com Toolbar! It’s available for free and for your enjoyment right now!

StuffWeLike.com Toolbar

It’s so simple to install, that even I can do it!

Click here and click on Download Toolbar. Don’t worry there’s no spyware. The toolbar provides you with the latest posts on the blog as well as the Forum via RSS feed. It also contains direct links to the blog, The Pipeline, and Forum. With Google search, weather output, and a pop-up blocker this toolbar will fit all your needs!

Die YouTube DIE!

Those are the thoughts of many YouTube users. YouTubers are going so balistic about ads being placed onto videos that Google has temporarily stopped showing video ads altogether! Great job guys! Apparently the research and development team at YouTube really thought this one out…

I don’t have any issue with ads being placed on my videos if I had control over what is being shown and that I can actually make money off of it. If I’m embedding the video onto my website, do I not deserve a cut of the money made off of the ad? My viewers are watching the video – not YouTubers!

YouTube Ad

If YouTube is to survive, it needs ads everywhere. I don’t even think Google is willing to lose billions of dollars on this site if it can’t pull its act together.

But YouTube fans are so dedicated that they have already built a way to avoid YouTube video ads entirely! This FireFox browser extension called TubeStop specifically eliminates ads from your viewing pleasure.

If YouTube can’t guarantee that sponsors receive viewership, why would they want to advertise on YouTube?

The future is not YouTube?

YouTube is implementing video ads on user videos! Runaway, RUNAWAY! Here’s how their new ads work:
15 seconds into your video another video will overlay on top of that near the bottom, the video will stay up for 10 seconds unless the user clicks on it, by clicking on it the ad will play and the user video will pause, if the user doesn’t click on the video after 10 seconds the ad will disappear. This picture within picture sounds great if YouTube were paying the content creators!

YouTube Ad

While YouTube is still testing out ads there are a couple of services that already provide income to content producers:

Revver – Pre-roll/Post-roll ads. Requirements: original content, payments sent out after you’ve earned $20 or more.

MetaCafe – Banner ads at the bottom of the video. Requirements: original content, video needs at least 20,000 views and a 3 star or higher rating, payments sent out after you’ve earned $100 or more.

These two services are really the only ones that currently pay for your content. While Revver has less requirements before you receive a payment overall I’ve found it difficult to receive views from my videos on it. I don’t know if that’s because no one really goes onto Revver searching for videos or if the people using Revver aren’t interested in the content that I provided. MetaCafe on the other hand is easy to gain a couple hundred views in about a week, but the requirements of having to receive over 20,000 views and a 3 star rating or higher is ridiculous.

There is one more service that does pay users called Brightcove, but it’s really complicated to get your videos uploaded and just like Revver the videos that I did upload received extremely low view counts.

So while you might not get the view counts on these services as you do with YouTube at least you can start earning money today!

[Via SearchEngineLand]

The Pipeline Adds some Friends

Thanks to our partners we’ve added two new shows today. The first is Next-Gen Walkthroughs which has videos showing entire sequences of what happens in games. If you ever get stuck in a game, don’t bother reading a strategy guide just watch this show. The second show is New Gen Gamers Playground. This is a audio podcast from New Gen Gamers covering the world of games.

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