Well we finally got around updating our design. Not much change in the way of interaction, we more just made it easier to look at 
. We still support all of your favorite video providers and we’re still adding them. We hope you enjoy this one alittle more.
Thanks, and keep the feedback coming in.
TVA Team
Good news in the way of RSS. We have some additional feeds for your aggregating pleasure. First thing to note is on the most voted page we are now allowing you to see most voted videos by today, this week, this month or ever. And to go along with that you can also subscribe to any of the feeds for the most voted of today, this week, this month or ever (via feedster). If you were subscribed to the original most voted feed then you will now be seeing the days most popular videos.
Also a word out to the video providers, please please please start providing some valuable rss feeds of your content. Most importantly a most popular/featured which changes more than once a year and some facility to do a tag search. We won’t name any names but you know who you are.
Hopefully in the days/weeks to come we’ll be working on getting the actual video as an enclosure in the feed. So stayed tuned here for the latest.
TVA Team
TechCrunch writes about the new technology which GUBA is working on named “Johnny.” Basically it detects copyrighted footage in videos and is able to flag them.
This could really change the online video landscape, if it works. Goodbye Animal Planet clips on YouTube, for one thing.
This is very interesting news on many fronts. But more importantly, just the pure technology of it seems pretty cool. Not sure what the algorithm to detect these images would be but i’m sure it would be an entertaining read (for a computer science guy anyways )
Mashable writes about the new European launch.
Google Video still lags YouTube for a number of reasons, but I think the core problem was its early failure to tap into the prime demographic: the 15-25 year old MySpace user.
Another reason i’d like to point out is that YouTube provides far superior RSS feeds than Google and for that matter any other provider I’ve encountered. And in our opinion, this is so critical in these types of sites. We’re planning more features for TVA but it makes it difficult when so many providers do not provide RSS Feeds. GO YOUTUBE!
TVA Team
So now for our popular feed we are pulling in videos from Google Video, YouTube, iFilm and now Grouper!
During the design and development of thevideoawards.com we made a pretty large decision not to allow users to directly enter the embed tag into our system to display their video. The reason was based on security concerns around allowing this type of scripts to get embedded directly. This means whatever you would enter in would get displayed, and since embed has some security ramifications we decided this wasn’t a good way to go. Instead we have a unique way to post every video.
The process we use will not take the embed script and display directly, instead we will take the key to the video and generate the embed automagically. Most of the video providers have a very simple pattern by which the embed string is constant except for the key. The con is this is more difficult on the user, the pro is that we can have complete control on how the video is shown and this is important. For example, in some cases, the embed script provided is with autoplay turned on, this is not an option for us, we can’t have some videos turn on automatically and other not. In other cases, the embed script will specify an unoptimal size or include header information images. All of these things are avoided since we can now control the way the videos appear.
In most cases, retrieving the video key is fairly straightforward, for example YouTube puts it right in their URL to grab it. When you submit a video, based on the provider you choose we display the step-by-step instructions to post your video. We’ve also create a “preview video” function which will ensure you followed the steps right before you post. So if there is any confusion you can test it.
That’s it for now, I hope this answers some of the questions we’ve been getting on this.
TVA Team
Here’s a great new feature of the system. We’ve taken popular feeds from YouTube, Google Video and iFilm and have created a page which just shows those videos. So with that addition, the site has two major sections.
The great thing about this is not only are you able to see videos from across multiple providers but now you can see what the users of their site feel is popular as well. So in one page you’re viewing, popular videos from iFilm, YouTube and Google!
Now, why are we only supporting 3 sites, when users can submit from many others? Well those are the only 3 which provide a popular video feed (isn’t that amazing???). If you know of one we missed let us know!
From Mashable:
Metacafe Gets $15 million for Video-Sharing Site
Metacafe, the popular Israeli video site, has taken a hefty $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners - on top of an original investment from Benchmark of $5 million.
Considering all the amateaur videos we’re watching these days, I figure an article on some good tips on using your camcorder would be relevant. The 10 steps that the article outlines is:
