I was recently asked to speak about Video Trends to a large group of 100+ Bloggers at the SOBCON event in Chicago. The Event was really amazing and had some other great speakers including: Robyn Tippins from MyBlogLog & Andy Sernovitz Author of Word of Mouth Marketing. I only had about 25 minutes, but what I hoped to educate people on was the upcoming video trends for 2007 and how they could embrace these video trends with their blogs and video widgets.

First they had to be made aware that there is great video content online that is buried in the mountain of garbage. There are amazing video gems just buried beneath the surface of the short attention span videos. Don’t get me wrong, there is value in the short attention span videos.

Top 5 Online Video Trends:

1. Better video Search Tools
2. User Aggregated Video Channels or Playlists
3. Video Channel Widgets
4. Community forming around video Channel Themes
5. Connections with other people that watched the same videos as you.

See the Video Trends presentation here:

http://www.slideshare.net/Rumford/video-trends-sobcon-2007

Comments?

Technorati Tags: YouTube, video trends, video channel, video aggregation, video sharing, video playlist, google video, video community, Blog, video search, google video, video widgets, business, videosticky, videosticky.com, Rodney Rumford

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We have been getting good feedback from our Alpha testers of VideoSticky. Thanks Everyone! The video community design team has been hard at work trying to simplify the design and usability. For the upcoming Beta launch we have redone the logo, page layout, Navigation, website design, etc…

Making the site EASY and intuitive is critical. We are going to bury some of the functionality further down into the Video Community site so that users are not overwhelmed initially with the feature set and power of the service. We would like to hear what you think of the new home page design. The large area that says “Create” is actually a flash animation that walks you through the 3 main concepts on a high level. Create | Share | Connect. in about 10 seconds.

We think it allows users to rapidly see & quickly grasp the concept of how they can use video sticky to create a video aggregated channel, and share it several ways and use it to build community and connect with other like minded individuals.

It ties into our design mantra of “Don’t Make Me Think”. Simple is better, Less is more.

Tell us what you think of the new website design, it is still a work in progress and we will have more changes coming. Thanks for your feedback.

p.s. We also did a total redesign on the blog as well. We hope you likey.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Youtube community, design, alpha, beta, online video community, video community, video sharing, VideoSticky

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I was talking to someone on the team yesterday and we were discussing difference in video sharing sites. One of the key components that is missing from virtually every site is a way to share video efficiently outside of that particular sites inventory of video. This really means that there are no easy video widgets that allow you to aggregate from multiple video community platforms and share video channels… this is a problem when there are many great videos to share and they are on multiple sites…

Cross platform video aggregation is a part of the solution… and a part of what we allow users to do with video.
That is one of the big problems that www.videosticky.com solves. You will notice video channel widgets in the sidebar of this blog. These widgets combine video from multiple sites… pretty cool… tell us what you think… thanks for the feedback.

Rodney Rumford

Technorati Tags: YouTube, myspace, stickyvideo, video channel, video aggregation, video sharing, video playlist, google video, video community, Blog, video search, google video, startup, vc, business, videosticky, videosticky.com, Rodney Rumford

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UAV (User Aggregated Video) is a concept who’s time has come. There is a ton of pain in finding the gems of user generated video online… lots of gems hidden in the mountain of garbage. User aggregation across multiple online video services such as youtube, google video, yahoo video, myspace video, etc… is key.

Content syndication via rss for user created channels/playlists/connections/etc. is also key. Easy discovery of the user aggregated content is also critical. Having an easy way to allow the 10% of community users that don’t actually create video content, to create a channel of content that they are passionate about is really critical.

The video marketplace is very fragmented and there is room for multiple solutions. New startups might partner with the tradional media giants. But there is also an opportunity for solutions that are not connected with the media giants.

Users are watching less and less TV and are consuming video more often online. This trend in user behavior allows for virtually unlimited channels of content to be created beyond just “My Personal Favorites” sort of lists. Worthy of note is that online users are consuming new media not created by the media giants.

Consumers ideas of entertainment is shifting rapidly towards online with UGC playing an important role. There are nearly 80,000-1000,000 new videos uploaded online every day, they can’t all be crap, there are some real gems in there. Users will aggregate videos for many of the same reasons people blog, to voice their opinions and tastes, to make connections, to share content, to take ownership of their ideas and principles, to be their own channel programmer, to create a communication channels that is syndicatable, to build a community around an idea/concept/theme/product/person/personal taste, etc…

There are literally tens of thousands of virtual channel opportunities that will support very narrow niches online. We will be launching this week in alpha at www.videosticky.com There some other ideas I have around this subject, technologies under development and how the model for online video is shifting, but I will save them for later.

Rodney Rumford, CEO

www.videosticky.com

Technorati Tags: UAV, RSS, User Aggregated Video, YouTube, myspace, video sharing, video playlist, google video, video community, Blog, video search, google video, startup, vc, business, videosticky, videosticky.com, Rodney Rumford

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Part of what we are building at videosticky.com will be a video widget so that you can display playlists in your blog, myspace page or any website for that matter. While the team was discussing this and road mapping the product we came up with a list of cool features that we would like to offer to enhance the online video viewing experience.

ability to size the thumbnail preview

ability to decide how many videos to put into a playlist

widget sizing (height and width)

widget header text

widget footer text

widget color wheel selection for backgrounds, borders, headers, footers and text.

AJAX features

Descriptions for each video on mouse over

and quite a few more…..

Any other ideas or suggestions? We really would like to hear your feedback as we are still building and are getting closer to a feature lockdown for the beta version.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, video sharing, video playlist, google video, Youtube search, video community, Blog, video search, google video, startup, vc, business, videosticky, videosticky.com, Rodney Rumford

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