7. Week 36

Dear Diary,

Job for today, researching usage and uses of video in social media.
 

  The number of videos viewed on Facebook is up an astounding 1800% this year and is now #3 video site behind YouTube and Hulu. - http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

Every minute over 20 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube:-http://www.viralblog.com

With over 2 Billion views a day YouTube has a massive audience and with the average person spending 15 minutes on the site they are a captive audience:-http://www.viralblog.com

Facebook now contains an app called videobox which allows you to publish videos directly onto your facebook page:-http://www.facebook.com/apps/

Sites like livestream have partnered with social media sites to create a truly interactive experience. You can now tweet and share your live video directyly from livestream and the live broadcast is viewable within the twitter timeline (currently depending on  browser). Livestream also offers a chat section with your video. If a user logs into the chat with a twitter account, the chat message will be tweeted along with the video feed allowing for a truly social experience and allowing the audience to grow.

Quite a lot of video embed sites offer social media buttons on their players, this is a key way of getting your media out there. It is important to make it as easy as possible to share your content. The web is supposed to be a freeflowing experience, any lag in the chain could put people off.

AMENDMENT:-

ok spend much of yesterday( after looking into social video) looking at the livestream api and managed to develop a player which looks similarly to that of the idrop players silverstream have developed. this is important fror the iphone multiplayer iv been developing.

After realising the embed capabilities of twitter I was thinking wether or not facebook would have any connections with livestream. Then i found Livestream had an app within facebook which allows you to embed a channel into facebook pages. this allows users to view your live stream, share it within facebook allowing you to broadcast to you user base.

6. Week 29

Dear Diary,
Wow i have definately neglected you, its has been 20 weeks since my last post and now im past the halfway point of my placement. Part 1 of the uploader has been deployed for use by my collleagues. This allows them to:
- Create Client
- Upload videos
- Generate thumbnails for those videos and/or upload thumbnails
- Generate deployment code
-Videos will play on different OS: Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.
When i say Android any phone using a version later and including 2.2 will automatically use the flash player used for mac and windows machines. Where iPhone runes from a direct http link to the video.
Blackberry however is a whole new kettle of fish which i have been battling for the past few days now. The encode for the different blackberry devices are quite specific and wont work with http. so the only other option from that side of things is to stream the video via rtsp (Real Time Streaming Protocol). Which i have managed to achieve, and video will play the only issue now being that it cuts out after around 44 seconds. So the encoding of the video doesn't seem to be an issue as it plays fine up to a point. It also plays fine from the phones memory, so this leads me to believe that its a network issue.
I will let you know how i get on with that......
So part one of the system is in use.. I am currently working on part 2 which brings in projects, channels and players. Allowing for easy creation of players using my system.
videos are uploaded to projects, channels are created in projects and you are given the list of videos available to include in those channels. You create the player using the player design flash tool and then pick which channels you want to dedicate to that player and what order you want to display them in.
The real trick will be whether or not i can create a html version of the player to work on non-flash enabled mobiles and I am yet to combine my skinning tool with the flash player created already which is quite a big job.
You will be notified of my progress in due time.