A brilliant video delivery platform

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Video has taken on a whole new life on the Web now that connection speeds are higher and editing tools are better. And thus we come to a cool service called Viddler, which unlike other video services adds a really compelling social networking aspect to the content.

Viddler allows you to upload video content or record direct from your video camera. You can add a comment, tags, and designate the video to be public if you wish. Be warned, after uploading or recording, conversion can take a while.

Where Viddler really shines is in the video player. The entire system is Flash-based and simply a brilliant concept! If the video owner allows it, other registered users can add comments and tags in the timeline, then as the video plays the beginning of each comment and tag is displayed in a bubble as the playback point in the timeline meets them. Clicking on the bubble expands it to show the full text. You can also add video tags, which is a stroke of genius!

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Video has taken on a whole new life on the Web now that connection speeds are higher and editing tools are better. And thus we come to a cool service called Viddler, which unlike other video services adds a really compelling social networking aspect to the content.

Viddler allows you to upload video content or record direct from your video camera. You can add a comment, tags, and designate the video to be public if you wish. Be warned, after uploading or recording, conversion can take a while.

Where Viddler really shines is in the video player. The entire system is Flash-based and simply a brilliant concept! If the video owner allows it, other registered users can add comments and tags in the timeline, then as the video plays the beginning of each comment and tag is displayed in a bubble as the playback point in the timeline meets them. Clicking on the bubble expands it to show the full text. You can also add video tags, which is a stroke of genius!

There are buttons at the top of the player that allow you to switch off the tag and comment display, e-mail a link to the video, get the video’s URL, get code to embed the video in a Web page or blog, view all the tags and comments, resize to the original size, and expand to full screen.

At the bottom are buttons for play/pause, speaker volume, a menu for adding tags, etc., and a menu button that shrinks the video and displays the title, stats (number of views, comments, how many times people have labeled it as a favorite, and how many trackbacks it has) as well as a scrolling list of either other videos by the user or related videos by friends of the user.

There are pages to manage your account, manage your videos and, really creatively, get revenue for your content! Viddler allows you to define which delivery methods you’d like to add adverts to (embedded, through affiliates like Amazon, through timed tags, etc.) and collect money into your PayPal account. Here’s the cool part: Viddler pays you 50% of the revenue!

Viddler uses some curiously naive and irritatingly corny content in their “Learn More” section, which features two women watching a cooking video. Not only is it pretty awful but because you can add comments several users have chosen to be very critical (one user noted at 18 seconds into the video that one of the women has “tadpoles for eyebrows”).

I really like this service; it is well executed and has already attracted a lot of users and content. One of my favorite videos on Viddler is the best explanation of Web 2.0 I’ve seen so far.

I’ve only covered the highlights of the Viddler interface and services so there’s a lot more for you to explore. I think this has to be one of the best Web applications I’ve seen for some time. It has tremendous functionality, solid engineering, provides great value to users, and has one of the cleverest monetizing methods I’ve come across.

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Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.