Viddyou: The Blog.

September 9

Big Update!

We’ve been hard at work all Summer adding new features, upgrading, and more. There’s a lot happening at Viddyou all the time and a lot of that has to do with all of you, your great feedback and continued support!

Exciting New Things Are Happening Today…

Today we have added new features that continue to make Viddyou the best and most private home for your personal video. Point your browser to www.viddyou.com and explore the latest enhancements to the best personal video service available and read on to learn what’s been added…

Summer Is More Fun With New Features.

Some quick highlights of the new goodness that Viddyou is bringing to you.

  • High Bitrate (HBR) Video For All:
    High Bitrate video provides more detail and higher resolution for enhanced clarity and full-screen playback. Previously HBR was only available to Premium accounts but we’re now offering 640x480 HBR video to all FREE accounts! 

    Premium users enjoy an expanded range of HBR compatible resolutions detailed here and more!
     
  • New! Faster Optimized HD Video Players:
    We retired the old video player and wrote this one from scratch with a focus on being faster for smoother playback of HD + HBR video on more computers with some new features added in.
     
  • One Player — All Of Your Videos:
    We have upgraded and added a new player that lets you embed ONE player that will let you playback ALL of your videos for your blog or personal website from within the player!
     
  • Expanded Privacy Options:
    Want to embed a video on your blog, website or a social network and have it hidden to public view on Viddyou? Now you can! Select “Hide On Viddyou” under the More Options link when uploading or recording and the video will be hidden on Viddyou, but still able to be shared on external websites.
     
  • Expanded High Definition (HD) Video:
    Viddyou is proud to offer full 1080 and 720p HD for your videos and we keep making it better. Viddyou has added support for 4:3 HD formats of 1440x1080 (1080p) and 960x720 (720p) for increased camera support.
     
  • Viddyou Is Faster On Your 3G iPhone:
    Apple has upgraded the iPhone to blazing fast 3G enabling you to watch all of your videos while you’re on the go from your iPhone at iphone.viddyou.com faster than ever! The old iPhone will still work too so fret not.
     
  • FREE Viddyou Die-Cut Stickers:
    (View Here) While supplies last we’ll send you out some Viddyou stickers to gloss up that computer, car, bike, or whatever you end up sticking them on. Login to Viddyou and Message Ryan with your address to get some!

Upgrade To The Premium Experience!

For less than $3.00 per month you can add HD video, expanded privacy controls, online backup and downloading of your original videos and more features that you can’t get anywhere else. Upgrade Now…

Commercial Use + Viddyou.

Viddyou accounts are for personal use, but if you have commercial interests we would love to discuss a usage plan tailored exactly to your business needs. Send an email and let’s talk!

All The Best,

Aaron + Ryan

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August 26

DNS Move Tonight

Tonight we’re moving some of our DNS servers. This update should be transparent and hopefully will not affect any of our members, but because of oddities in the global propagation of DNS data there is a very slight chance you may briefly be unable to visit Viddyou.com. If you continue to have problems visiting Viddyou please feel free to contact our support team.

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July 23

New Resolution & New Feature

While the bulk of tonight’s update relates to our back-end systems, there are a few changes you will be able to notice. In our last blog entry we mentioned that HD support for 1440x810 would be forthcoming, and we are excited to announce it is now available for our Premium users.

We’ve also added a new feature for all users that will allow you to record or upload a video and embed it on your blog (or MySpace, Facebook, website, etc), without having the video appear on our /explore page, or to any user (except for yourself when you’re logged in) in your viddstream.

This new feature is a great new opportunity for those that want to take advantage of the high quality video options we offer at Viddyou, but have already established other ways of sharing with their friends and families - now they can have the best of both worlds.

To take advantage of this new setting, check the “Hide On Viddyou?” option under the “More Options?” menu when uploading or recording a video. You can also select this option on videos you’ve already uploaded, from your video management page. 

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July 7

What’s New This Week

Right before the Fourth of July holiday we pushed a new batch of updates. Here’s a quick overview of the two main updates:

1. We’ve overhauled the way still images are generated from your videos. Video thumbnails are now sharper, clearer and smoother.

2. We’ve added additional support for several new High Definition resolutions. This means, that in addition to the common 1280x720 and 1920x1080 HD formats, Premium members will now be able to upload several other less-popular HD variants, and have their video processed at the native, uploaded resolution. 

Here’s a complete list of the HD resolutions currently available to our Premium members: 1280x720, 1920x1080, 1440x1080, 960x720, with support for 1440x810 coming shortly.

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June 13
Today we’ve updated our video blog application for Facebook. This release now allows you to add the Video Blog application to Facebook’s Pages. So your customers, business, or fans can enjoy beautiful High Definition video, and all of the other wonderful benefits of Viddyou, right on your organization’s Facebook page. This release also fixes some minor bugs you may have encountered in Firefox or Internet Explorer. If you’ve already installed our Video Blog application on your Facebook account, there’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of the new capabilities. If you haven’t installed it yet, what are you waiting for? ;)

Today we’ve updated our video blog application for Facebook. This release now allows you to add the Video Blog application to Facebook’s Pages. So your customers, business, or fans can enjoy beautiful High Definition video, and all of the other wonderful benefits of Viddyou, right on your organization’s Facebook page.

This release also fixes some minor bugs you may have encountered in Firefox or Internet Explorer.

If you’ve already installed our Video Blog application on your Facebook account, there’s nothing you need to do to take advantage of the new capabilities. If you haven’t installed it yet, what are you waiting for? ;)

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June 12

Record Video On Your iPhone

This week saw the announcement of Apple’s new iPhone coming out in July. And while we were excited to see GPS and 3G coming in the new version, we were really bummed they still haven’t built in support for recording video (something that, to us, should be a no-brainer).

If you’re still looking for a way to record video on your iPhone we recommend using the iPhone Video Recorder by DreamCatcher, which we recently added support for. Using this application and your iPhone, uploading video to Viddyou is as easy as sending an email.

For more information on using your mobile phone to post videos to Viddyou, please check out our help section.

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June 5

Our friends at Noisepop have partnered with the SEIU (the largest Union in the country that represents hospital and healthcare workers, doormen and other service employees) to produce this short film entitled “No Free Lunch” staring Lewis Black with original music by Radio 4.

For more information about their campaign, you can read their writeup in the NY Times or head to their official website. 

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May 22

3/4 HD (960x540) Support Now Available

Today we’re announcing 960x540 support for Premium Accounts. If you work in iMovie you’ll find that the “best quality” output is 960x540 - which is 3/4 720p resolution - when Premium members submit files at this resolution we’ll now maintain those dimensions at a bitrate above our Standard Definitition videos. This is a great way for those who want a good looking video that doesn’t have the computing and bandwidth demands of 720 or 1080 HD. This is also the same resolution that the Apple TV uses.

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May 21
Tonight we’re launching a very exciting update to our popular Facebook application that will make the integration between Viddyou and Facebook tighter than ever before. Beyond an overhaul to the entire Facebook application interface so that it will look and feel like the experience you are accustomed to on Viddyou.com, we have added two new ground-breaking features: 1. Upload and record directly to Viddyou without ever leaving Facebook for free. Plus, our Premium members will be able to upload High Definition video and record for twenty minutes, just like they can on Viddyou.com.  2. The ability to designate your videos ‘Facebook Only’. This powerful new privacy setting allows you to share your videos under the same privacy restrictions that you have set up through Facebook, regardless of whether or not your Facebook friends have a Viddyou account.  In order to take advantage of these new features you’ll need to have our Facbeook Video Blog application added to your Facebook Account. Click here to add it, if you haven’t done so already. Existing users of the old version of our Facebook application will need to enter their Viddyou username and password to link their Facebook and Viddyou accounts, and take advantage of these new features.

Tonight we’re launching a very exciting update to our popular Facebook application that will make the integration between Viddyou and Facebook tighter than ever before.

Beyond an overhaul to the entire Facebook application interface so that it will look and feel like the experience you are accustomed to on Viddyou.com, we have added two new ground-breaking features:

1. Upload and record directly to Viddyou without ever leaving Facebook for free. Plus, our Premium members will be able to upload High Definition video and record for twenty minutes, just like they can on Viddyou.com. 

2. The ability to designate your videos ‘Facebook Only’. This powerful new privacy setting allows you to share your videos under the same privacy restrictions that you have set up through Facebook, regardless of whether or not your Facebook friends have a Viddyou account. 

In order to take advantage of these new features you’ll need to have our Facbeook Video Blog application added to your Facebook Account. Click here to add it, if you haven’t done so already.

Existing users of the old version of our Facebook application will need to enter their Viddyou username and password to link their Facebook and Viddyou accounts, and take advantage of these new features.

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May 18

Twitter Notification Fixed

For those of you that use our Twitter Notification feature (it sends a quick tweet whenever you post a new video), you may have noticed that recently those tweets stopped tweeting.

Thanks to Viddyou user Eilla, we became aware of the problem and were able to track it down to a change Twitter made to their API that we weren’t aware of. We’ve taken care of fixing it, and we apologize for the interruption. So everything is back to running great again! :]

Ed. Note: These things always seem to happen on Sundays, don’t they? 

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