VidCaster Blog

Now you can more easily manage your videos & feature your favorite videos

Posted by Ray Pawulich on May 11, 2012 Comments

You asked for it and the VidCaster team listened! That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve overhauled our video management interface to make it easier for you to manage your library and to choose which videos will be featured on your site’s homepage.

With this update, you can more easily manage your public & private videos, all within one elegant interface. Now you can search through your videos to find exactly the one you need to edit without having to click through page after page. And now you can also now “bulk select” videos and add them into categories in one easy step.

We’ve also given you the ability to feature certain videos with our new “Playlists” feature. With this feature, you can select specific videos within your library that you’d like to appear at the top of your site’s homepage. This will allow you to highlight your favorite videos to ensure your viewers are seeing the content that you want them to see first.

“After years of service, our video management interface was long overdue for a redesign. Since we first launched, our users have changed and grown along with us and there has been increasing demand for a system that can better manage a large video library,” explains VidCaster designer and co-founder Steve Cochrane. “So we’ve gathered years of user feedback and addressed nearly all of the common requests, and the rest — like additional sorting options — are coming soon. We’re really happy with the new design and we hope you are too!”

Check out this tutorial demonstrating just how easy the new interface makes it to feature a video on your site:


Transcribe your videos into text … automagically!

Posted by Ray Pawulich on April 6, 2012 Comments

At VidCaster, we take great pride in making video publishing both easy and effective — easy for you and effective for your goals. That’s why we’re proud to announce our newest feature: automated transcription.

With this feature, VidCaster Gold users can easily order low-cost audio-to-text transcripts of their videos and have those transcripts automatically made available as both closed captions within the VidCaster player as well as in an interactive caption box on that video’s dedicated playback page.

Benefits of having your videos transcribed include: 

  • SEO — With a transcript, search engines can now index the actual content of your videos, increasing your chances of showing up in search results. 
     
  • End-user experience — Randomly skipping through videos to find specific sections is frustrating; with a transcription, viewers can easily search for specific phrases or terms within your videos and click on the transcript to jump directly to that spot in the video.

Here’s a tutorial video explaining more about how our transcription feature works:

To see the interactive caption box in action, visit the dedicated landing page for the above video.

What is video content marketing?

Posted by Ray Pawulich on March 16, 2012 Comments

One of the hottest trends in marketing today is content marketing. In short, content marketing involves the creation of content (such as this blog post) that is designed to attract your target customer and further business goals such as building your brand, identifying leads, and making sales. Because content marketing can typically be done “for free” it is often leveraged by smaller companies and organizations as an alternative to pricy paid media campaigns.

Video content marketing adheres to the same principles as content marketing but with an obvious qualification: video content marketing is the creation of video content designed to attract your target customer and further your business goals. In all other ways, it is identical.

Blogging platforms — i.e. tools for posting primarily text-based content on a site over which you have full control — have matured enough as a medium that content marketers almost instinctively know how to use them in a way that drives their business goals. For example, the design of this blog closely mimics the look and feel of our main site so a prospective customer who finds this post via a web search for the term “video content marketing” has just as much of an opportunity to convert to a trial user of VidCaster as one who visits our main site directly. This is widely understood as best-practice for a blog.

Meanwhile, tools for publishing video content in a branded environment are relatively new — especially compared to video-sharing sites — so many content marketers do not yet fully understand the importance of publishing their video content in an environment over which they have full control. But the same best-practices that apply to a blog also apply to a video site.

Additionally, because videos are often embedded into third-party sites in a way that blog posts often are not, video content marketers may also want to consider using call-to-action messages within the video player itself in order to fully leverage the value of the video content they are creating.

When a branded blog and a branded video site are both used, marketers have the full range of content marketing tools at their disposal.

For more information on content marketing and video content marketing, check out this video of a class taught by VidCaster CEO and Co-Founder Kieran Farr:

iPhone 4S Professional Camera Kit — Interchangeable Lenses

Posted by Ray Pawulich on December 8, 2011 Comments

In our last post, we debuted our iPhone 4S professional camera kit and showed what a difference an external microphone makes for audio capture.

Today, we’re taking a look at how you can use the interchangeable lens feature of the Owlee Bubu to vary the visual feel of your shots.

For example, you can use wide angle lenses to bring in more of the surroundings around your subject. Or you can use a telephoto lens to zoom in on your subject without sacrificing optical quality. 

Both types of lenses also give you interesting options for playing with depth-of-field when composing your shots.

Here’s a quick video testing both types of lenses. (The audio for this video was recorded using an XLR lapel mic.)

iPhone 4S Professional Camera Kit — First Impressions

Posted by Ray Pawulich on December 7, 2011 Comments

Non-denominational winter holiday came early here at VidCaster!

Typically, when users ask us for a recommendation on a video camera, we say “the iPhone” — now we’ve decided to take the leap ourselves into the exciting world of professional cellphone videography with a whole slew of cool add-ons that help turn the iPhone 4S into the ultimate video camera.

Here’s what we got — all from B&H Photo Video:

We’ll do another post soon taking a look how these tools improve the quality of the video you can get from the iPhone 4S — for now, we wanted to take a quick look at the impact of using an external mic.

Check out this demo video to see … or rather hear for yourself:

Presenting the “IdCaster”

Posted by Ray Pawulich on December 2, 2011 Comments

At last night’s Foodspotting Startup Mixoff at the new Rackspace office, VidCaster was proud to debut our first branded libation — the IdCaster cocktail.

Designed to be as easy to drink as VidCaster is easy to use, the IdCaster goes down smoothly but packs enough power to let you cast your ego (and your id) aside for the evening. Foodspotting’s Chris Connolly called it “dangerously drinkable”, which we consider a very high compliment!

Want to make your own IdCaster? Just follow this simple recipe:

4 parts Jim Beam Devil’s Cut whiskey

1 part orange juice

1 part lemon juice

1/3 part grenadine

Shake over ice and strain into a serving glass.

For more info and to check out all the cocktails from the mixoff, visit the official Foodspotting guide for the event.

And don’t forget to check out our quick video review of the IdCaster:

VidCaster launches YouTube-powered free plan

Posted by Ray Pawulich on November 8, 2011 Comments

Got a YouTube channel? Now you can have your own custom video website to go along with it — for free.

That’s because the San Francisco-based online video platform VidCaster today announced that it has launched a new VidCaster Free plan powered by YouTube, bringing VidCaster’s powerful site- making and video SEO tools to the YouTube ecosystem.

“YouTube is home to an amazing amount of video content and now the owners of that content can easily create their own branded destination sites,” said Kieran Farr, VidCaster’s CEO and co- founder. “And because VidCaster Free automatically syncs with a YouTube channel, no maintenance is required beyond the initial setup,” Farr said.

Like the paid VidCaster Silver ($39/mo) and VidCaster Gold ($99/mo) plans, the VidCaster Free plan allows users to choose a professionally-designed site theme, upload their logo, and select custom colors to create a unique viewing environment for their videos. And like paid VidCaster plans, the VidCaster Free plan also includes automatic video SEO to direct search results on sites like Google to a user’s video site.

“If you take a YouTube embed code and just paste it into, say, a blog post, search engines actually don’t know that it’s a video so users searching for your video will have a hard time finding it. With our automatic video SEO, that’s not something you have to worry about — it just works,” Farr explained.

VidCaster Free users who want to set their site up on their own domain name can do so for $20/ year. For users who need more power — such as the ability to put their logo in the player, run their own advertisements, or customize the CSS & HTML of their site — VidCaster recommends upgrading to the paid Silver and Gold plans.

For more information, visit: http://www.vidcaster.com/youtube

Making a video website is now easier than ever

Posted by Ray Pawulich on October 27, 2011 Comments

Independent event promoter and startup consultant Nathan Beckord had a problem: his Silicon Valley event series, Startup Exits, was thriving but he had no place to publish the video recordings of the events.

“We wanted to host our videos in a way that was more consistent with our brand, than traditional video-sharing services such as Vimeo or YouTube,” Beckord said.

Unfortunately, the cost and technical complexity of building and maintaining his own solution — even one built around a ‘player-only’ online video platform such as Brightcove or Ooyala — was more trouble than it was worth. “I needed something that would work right out of the box,” Beckord said.

Enter VidCaster, a do-it-yourself web tool which enables its users to create custom video-based websites with just a few clicks. With VidCaster, Beckord was able to easily build an SEO-optimized video site — video.startupexits.com — that matched his brand and integrated with his existing website for the event series. He also included elements driving traffic to his corporate site, venturearchetypes.com.

“For people without the time or ability to make their own video site, VidCaster provides the best of both worlds. You get a beautiful, custom ‘home’ for your online videos but none of the technical headaches that come with making such a site yourself,” said Kieran Farr, VidCaster’s CEO and co-founder.

VidCaster also helped Matt Schulz, managing editor with Austin, TX-based credit cards advocacy group CreditCards.com, build out the video.creditcards.com video site for his organization. “We were looking for a simple yet attractive way to present our video library on our website,” when he came across VidCaster, Schulz said.

Just by uploading a logo, selecting a theme, and making a few custom tweaks, Schulz was able to build a custom video site for his organization — without diverting resources from his IT department. “Being able to do it myself quickly freed up our IT resources for other projects,” Schulz said.

For the VidCaster team that means a job well-done, Farr explained. “Our goal is to take this complicated, difficult, and often frustrating process and make it easy,” Farr said.

For users like Beckord and Schulz, that means great-looking video sites without a lot of work. “The process was seamless, the quality excellent, the team very supportive, and the design — well, that’s my favorite part,” Beckord said.

Sesame Street porn incident raises questions about the security of online video for brands

Posted by Ray Pawulich on October 18, 2011 Comments

There’s been some chatter in the last few days about the security of online video, especially for brands.

In one highly-publicized incident, the official YouTube channel for Sesame Street recently had all its content wiped away and replaced with hardcore pornography. The severity of a security oversight like that by a brand aimed at children obviously needs no embellishment but it would be embarrassing for any brand.

Of course, little is known about how the attack was done — a random person may have gained access to the Sesame Street YouTube account simply by guessing the password or it could have been an inside job by someone who had a legitimate reason for knowing the password. And while there is little that Google or any vendor can do to prevent a weak password from being guessed, this incident should serve as a red-flag for brands who are publishing their content on services such as YouTube and Vimeo.

The current system: not ideal

Although security vulnerabilities are a fact of life in the digital age, a responsible company will do everything in its power to ensure that all communications that go out through its branded channels are 100% approved by the brand itself.

This is why it’s always been a head-scratcher for me that passwords for social media and video-sharing sites are passed around with such disregard for security. A brand looking to post content to YouTube, for example, will necessarily need a single login and password — after all, that’s the way these services are designed to work — but access to that password should be highly privileged information.

For example, let’s say you hire a freelance videographer to produce some content for your YouTube channel. While giving him your YouTube password is the simplest way to get the finished videos onto the channel, this offers you zero protection in case he decided to “go rogue” and publish unapproved content without your permission. The same danger exists for in-house employees.

How brands can protect themselves

A better system would be one where the true account holder can provision individual sub-accounts for each vendor or employee who needs access to the video-publishing workflow. What’s more, each person should only have access to the part of the workflow that they are responsible for — so that, for example, your freelance videographer can upload content but does not have the ability to publish it. 

VidCaster is not quite there in terms of granularity with sub-accounts but we are already ahead of the game in allowing you to provision sub-accounts. And because we allow you to publish your content to sites like YouTube and Twitter without revealing those passwords, this lets you “close the gap” to some extent when it comes to the security of those accounts.

Of course, there’s no magic bullet for account security — after all, even the most well-designed system can fall prey to a weak password or rogue employee. But brands should structure their content-publishing workflow around tools such as that provide as few points of failure as possible. 

Movin’ on up

Posted by Ray Pawulich on September 16, 2011 Comments

To quote Bob Dylan, the times they are a-changin’ …

Since mid-May, the VidCaster team has been honored to be part of Dave McClure’s 500 Startups accelerator program. As first-time entrepreneurs, the experience proved to be extremely valuable for us as Dave and his team helped whip us, our product, and our business into shape — all while keeping a roof over our heads and food (and beer … lots of beer) in our bellies. Now it’s four months later and the time has come for us to spread our wings and fly on our own.

And we’re wasting no time doing just that!

Earlier this week, not only did we move in to an incredible office space which we’re sharing with fellow 500 Startups alum Foodspotting but we also expanded our nascent team from four to five with the addition of Brandon Drew, our new VP of Sales. Brandon previously helped build an impressive book of business for PSD2CSS and is sure to help move the needle in a way that will make our investors very happy. (You can get a taste of both our new digs and Brandon’s unique sense of humor in the previous post on this very blog).

In the startup world, things move so quickly that we often forget to take stock of our accomplishments. But having our own office space and having a seasoned business veteran like Brandon onboard sends an unmistakable message: this is for real!

That said, it’s also just the beginning. Although we have succeeded in creating a viable company from nothing more than our blood, sweat, and tears, growing that company in a way that continues to deliver value to our customers and our investors presents a whole new set of challenges to overcome. Luckily, thanks to our amazing experience in 500 Startups, our world-class advisors, and our rockstar team, we feel more equipped than ever to face those challenges head-on. 

Stay tuned — the best is yet to come.