The Scoop on Blip.tv
Published by Josh Leo on 7 Oct 2005 at 9:26 am.
2 Comments.
Filed under Interviews.
Blip.tv is one of the hottest services out there for videobloggers, (we use it for all our WATM videos) and they just keep getting better and better. Who could complain about free, reliable video hosting that is easy on all fronts? I asked the folks at Blip, a few questions concerning the new features at Blip, the new things to look forward to, and also about the sustainability/possible charges of the service. They really seem to know what they are doing, but the best part is that they have their ears turned to the vlogosphere to find out exactly we need, so they can provide it.
“Our focus is very simple: we want to make video blogging easy. Everything we do is done with this in mind.”
Read the whole interview here:
WATM: What new features have you recently added to blip.tv
Blip: Statistics are probably the most important new feature we’ve added to blip in a while. Until now the only way to tell how many people were actually watching your video was to host it yourself, which is costly and difficult. Now video bloggers can use blip to host their video and we’ll tell them how many people are watching their video, how people are finding it and even what clients (like FireANT and iTunes) people are using to watch the video. It’s been really interesting to see how people watch the videos. There are some surprises in there.
The second big feature we rolled out last weekend was the ability to include tags in cross-posts. (Tags are like keywords, just words assigned to your video to make it easier to find) This is all part of our effort to make video blogging as easy as possible by removing steps from the process of posting video. Cross-posting lets you upload your video to blip and update your own blog at the same time by pressing a single “Post” button.
So now we let you include tags to be picked up by search engines like Technorati. If you assign the tag “katrina” to your video in blip and include tags in your cross-post to your blog (which could be on Blogger or Typepad or just running something like Wordpress) it will be found by Technorati and show up in http://www.technorati.com/tag/katrina automatically. Other search engines like Ice Rocket will pick it up, too, and we’re working with Peter at Mefeedia so that Mefeedia will pick up the tag automatically, as well.
WATM: What features can users be looking for in the future?
Blip: Our focus is very simple: we want to make video blogging easy. Everything we do is done with this in mind, and we always love to hear from people who are having trouble with video blogging. We like to hear about problems that need to be solved.
Right now people are telling us they want help with transcoding — converting video from one format (like Quicktime) to another format (like Windows Media). We’re also looking very hard at delivery options like BitTorrent that should help us deliver video to people more efficiently.
One of our goals at blip is to make it really easy to get up and video blogging in just a few minutes, without having to fuss with a dozen accounts on a dozen different services. We offer people videoblogs right now, but they’re not customizable enough to meet everyone’s needs, so we’ll be spending more time on that too.
WATM: Everyone is wondering, how/why is this free? Are their any plans for charges in the future?
Blip: We should talk about motivation before we talk about money. We’re building blip because we believe in the democratization of media, and hope we can facilitate it in some way. We hope that blip’s basic services will always be free. We want to make it easy for you to get a powerful message out the door and in front of the people you want to consume it. We believe that the ability to do this will change the world.
We’re able to offer the service for free right now because we’re using a resource we already had — blip’s founders are all geeks, and we got together and leased a bunch of bandwidth together long before we started blip. We started blip when we saw that videobloggers were having a bandwidth problem. We said “Hey, we’ve got bandwidth.”
With that said, Blip does cost us time and money and we want it to help pay our bills. Not only that, but bandwidth isn’t free and we don’t have enough of it to offer free hosting to the entire Internet. We’re looking at professional accounts and advertising but we want to have a detailed conversation with the community before getting into specifics.
WATM: Why should someone use blip instead of other free hosting options?
Blip: Our hosting is fast and reliable, we respect the Creative Commons, we integrate with the Internet Archive and we make publishing video easier than anyone else. Adam Quirk just called us “the best solution for videoblogging,” and we think he’s right.
Pokkari Blog on 7 Oct 2005 at 10:22 am: 1
[…] Josh Leo has just posted his interview with the blip crew (that’s us!) to We Are the Media. Josh writes: Blip.tv is one of the hottest services out there for videobloggers, (we use it for all our WATM videos) and they just keep getting better and better. Who could complain about free, reliable video hosting that is easy on all fronts? I asked the folks at Blip, a few questions concerning the new features at Blip, the new things to look forward to, and also about the sustainability/possible charges of the service. They really seem to know what they are doing, but the best part is that they have their ears turned to the vlogosphere to find out exactly what we need so they can provide it. […]
Randolfe Wicker on 19 Feb 2006 at 1:11 pm: 2
Blip continues to be amazing. I find it easy to simply scroll through page after page of vlogs and pick the few that look interesting.
The statistics are fascinating to study. For reasons unknown, a great vlog will sometimes get few hits and a poor one will get many.