VideoEgg is discontinuing its service my.videoegg.com on May 31st, 2008. The reason they’ve given on their FAQ page says it has to do with limited resources available for a start-up company. They are aiming to concentrate their efforts on the core business. Everyone who has uploaded videos using my.videoegg.com will be able to reclaim their content until the end of May. After that all embedded video players everywhere will display a corresponding discontinuation message, instead of video content.

If you’ve got video content you’d like to keep, head on over to my.videoegg.com before the end of May and save all your content. Upload it to YouTube instead, and start playing with AdSense for video.

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The new YouTube API allows even further integration of the YouTube service into all kinds of online projects. So far online applications could provide users with ways to upload and view videos, on various different devices, as well as comment and vote on video content.

The new API features include the following:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube now gives developers a way to produce applications that include uploading, managing, searching, and playing back video content and metadata, all available in the YouTube “cloud” (managed by YouTube). Sounds great, and having read some case studies they gave, some interesting ideas are springing into mind already…

Read in more detail on YouTube Blog.

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This is an interesting idea. Take video content and ad an overlay with object that users can interact with (sound better than “click” ). The idea is to create a connection between the content shown in a video and for example a product on another site, by allowing the user the option to see a link and click if they find it interesting. The video content is the ad, and done like this, it makes the whole commercial side of things less obtrusive to the viewer.

What remained as a problem was how to identify things in the video that users may want to learn more about (for example details about a certain brand, or object that appeared in the video). No artificial intelligence available could do this properly, but Overlay.TV thought of a way to by-pass this problem by involving users directly. Here’s how:

“Users would be able to identify, classify, tag and comment on objects inside the content. Users could be professionals working for advertising companies with obvious access to product placement details or they might be outside the advertising world looking to monetize content on their own site. There could also be users looking to be paid to use their familiarity with snowboard gear or their knowledge of fine china in exchange for marking up content. Getting users to identify objects in video would be straightforward in the specialized world we live in. All they would need is an incentive and that was simple too. Since companies pay for referrals, especially when they result in a sale, sharing that money with the user would be the perfect incentive.”

Overlay.TV has signed deals with many marketing affiliates to provide users a way to earn money from their creations. These include companies like Apple, Amazon, Tiger Direct, WallMart, Macy’s, Office Depot, and more.

Their promotional video (via Mashable) is very “amusing” to say the least. I like the way they gave it the early 80’s touch.

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BurstMedia released results from a study which tried to get some conclusive data about online consumer behavior in regards to video content. The results show that consumers are interested in video content, but are not very willing to have their viewing interrupted by video advertisements. Most people view online video content to stay informed and to be entertained, and are mostly male in the 18-34 age span. They are weary of in-stream advertising, while many abandon viewing ad-fronted videos altogether. On the bright side, about 20% of the tested people (about 2600 of them) seemed to remember the advertising bits that interrupted them, but the rest simply ingnored advertising or abandoned the site in question. According to the study, it’s not surprising that the young age group is more receptive to in-stream advertising (about 38% found this form of advertisements more appealing than other standard creative units).

For advertising purposes, it seems that good ol’ viral brand or product promotional videos are still the best option. Embedded advertising in videos seems to be a bit too intrusive as things stand, so a careful approach is required on this one, if the advertising investment is to have any positive effect at all. But that will probably change, as the whole online video scheme, even though a few years old, is still growing and evolving.

See the whole study here along with charts and everything.

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There has been a lot of posts about this in the past weeks. The “Here comes another bubble” video, by Richter Scale, has finally been re-released on YouTube, after an initial take down due to legal problems concerning a photo shown in the video, claimed to be the property of a Canadian photographer. Anyway, the video is pretty cool, so here it is … again:

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YouTube announced the expansion of its Partner Program to include anyone from Canada and the US that has accumulated significant popularity with their video content on YouTube to join the program and share part of the revenue generated by ads shown with the videos. The program is to expand further in the future to include international members as well.

If you have some interesting video content that you think can generate enough interest on YouTube, now is the time to do something with it. Also, go through your old 8mm footage and transfer that to digital format as well. Who knows, maybe you’ll find something worthy of several thousand views on YouTube.

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iDesktop.tv is pretty much a web site a different approach to creating the user interface for YouTube, but unlike YouTube, iDesktop allows viewers to save the video clip in any of the numerous formats offered - MP4, AVI, 3GP, 3GP2, WMV and EXE. The interface is much nicer in my opinion, but that’s a matter of taste I guess. I especially like the slider which controls how many video boxes are shown on the screen at a time - minimum three large boxes, or maximum 33 (at least at my screen resolution of 1280×800). The interface look is customizable, so users can add the personal touch to their profile. Usage experience is quite nice, with the whole interface resembling a desktop application. This is what they say, in 50 words or less :

“iDesktop.tv is an amazing modern dynamic web application for searching, watching and downloading YouTube videos. iDesktop.tv allows you to manage that content in many possible ways. With its incredible design and flexibility, it is one of the richest web applications for managing video content.”

iDesktop’s interface is what gives it juice, but it’s still pretty much a YouTube front. If the service expands with some unique features in the future or integrates other sources of video it will probably get a lot of attention. Good job so far!

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I read a great post on TechCrunch about how to optimize your viral YouTube videos to achieve high popularity. The author, Dan Ackerman Greenberg, shares some very interesting tips on what needs to be done to make your video stand out from all the rest, and there are tens of thousands of videos uploaded (!)daily. After reading this, I realized it’s not very easy and requires some in depth knowledge and skill. Here a few teasers as to what is talked about in this post:

• Not all viral videos are what they seem
• Content is NOT King
• Core Strategy: Getting onto the “Most Viewed” page
• Title Optimization
• Thumbnail Optimization
• Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself
• Releasing all videos simultaneously
• Strategic Tagging: Leading viewers down the rabbit hole
• Metrics/Tracking: How to measure effectiveness

Whoa! SEO is complicated, but this is getting there. I am sure this is not even close to everything there is to say about this subject. With the expansion of web video as a marketing tool, there will surely be a lot more to learn about this in the coming months and years.

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TokBox announced a new development. They now offer a group chat option for up to 6 simultaneous connections. This is currently available on Meebo. A change like this is welcome, especially after a great start by TokBox in mid-October.

There are a couple of other changes as well, such as improved video settings, immediate callback function, higher definition image quality, improved stability and speed.

TokBox already has an API which allows site visitors to talk to each other through the hosting site, without software downloads. If the API includes the group chat feature any time soon, than it will become a whole lot more useful.

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YouTube is to roll out high quality video content. Thus far, videos have been tailored for everyone to see, which meant they were made for lower connection speeds and most in 320×240px resolution. Within the next three months, YouTube will experiment with delivering high quality videos by detecting connection speed. Since the increase in video quality and connections speed requirements will mean content buffering for many of YouTube’s users, the experience may prove to be a little different than so far which is why YouTube is going to introduce broadband quality video slowly. Read more on C|NET News.

Although most of the videos on YouTube are quite satisfactory in terms of video quality, there are many cases where I wish the video quality was higher. In fact most videos, when put into full screen mode, look a lot like smudges. On the other hand, one of the things that made YouTube so popular was the fact that even dial-up connections could cope with video content streaming. Will videos uploaded as high quality be also available as low quality videos?

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