Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Thursday, April 3, 2008

Video Distribution Online Via The New Miro Co-Branded Player: Video

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If you produce multiple video channels and want to increase access and visibility to your video content you may want to consider the Miro video browser co-branded opportunity.

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In the last few weeks, Holmes Wilson, one of the founders of Miro (formerly Democracy Player) has been on a networking and partnering mission here in Europe and has made a stop-over also here in Rome where I have met him for a short conversation about Miro and its new co-branded player offering.

In this two short video clips I recorded you can listen to Holmes simple and straightforward explanation of what Miro is all about and how you could use it to optimize your own online video distribution and video marketing strategy.

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Miro - What Is It and Why You May Want To Download It - Holmes Wilson Explains



Holmes Wilson introduces,why it came about Miro and its key characteristics

Full English text transcription:

Well, this weird thing happened with the Internet video space where unlike publishing text or even audio on the Internet, with video the bandwidth cost and the complexity around transcoding in formats made it so that everyone's just dependent on this very large video silo hosting sites, like so much of the content audience is just all around, you know, YouTube in particular and a few others, and that's just not the way the Internet's supposed to be, it's not how it's supposed to work and presents real problems for freedom of speech and for people's ability to, you know, they have their making video program that they really care about.

It affects their ability to make decisions about context and about presentation and about, you know, everything from the type of space around the video to the quality of encoding and all that.

You know, many many publishers are dependent on this big video hosts that only give them one option and if they don't use one of those big video hosts they lose a lot of their audience. So that's just bad.

And where we see ourselves fitting into that is by making something that's more like a video browser. That's a program you run on your computer. You can point to any source out there, so anyone who's using Miro, this video browser, this video RSS aggregator, that works over an open standard can point Miro at any source whether those videos are hosted on YouTube or that feed is on FeedBurner, or coming from somebody's Wordpress blog or something typed in by hand or whatever.

Whatever people's hosting strategy is, if they're playing with that open standard, if they're using that open standard, it'll work in Miro. And we're creating a large audience of people watching video that way on cross and open standard.

They don't care where the video comes from, who it's hosted by, or even if it's hosted conventionally at all,I mean, publishers can even use BitTorrent to distribute their videos, which end, you know, if other peer-to-peer distribution platforms come along, like we'd like to, you know they're open-source, we'll incorporate that too.

So, the idea is to make it so that a publisher can put videos on her own server, they can put videos on any other service and that they're completely independent and the viewer has this whole on a video space that sends her around, him or her, instead of being sent around some video site.

So they can pull in video from any type of source and do whatever they want with it.

That's the idea: is to make an online video space that is more free like the Internet has been... in that it's open and competitive and everybody can... This is the main point, we want to make this space for everybody is as much on a level playing field as possible, so that people who have a lot of money for hosting and a lot of money for presenting their video and for doing deals with sites like YouTube, to get their video preferred placement or something like that, we want to make it so they're on a total level playing field with everybody else. Because there's no middle man, there's just viewers and publishers interacting across a totally open medium.

So if you haven't used Miro yet, you should download it, getMiro.com. Cause it makes it really easy to download video from anywhere, keep videos on the computer, manage videos, have your video library, play videos in full-screen, plays every video format you can think of pratically cause VLC just plays everything and works.




The Co-Branded Miro Video Player Offering



Holmes Wilson explains the Miro video player co-branding offer.

Full English text transcription:

So the idea with the Miro co-branded players is that if you have a few video podcasts that you're making you can use Miro as a platform for distributing them.

So what the Miro co-branded player lets you do is give your viewers a version of Miro that they can download that comes with your channels, like your video podcast pre-included and also comes with your collection of channels or your web pages actually, whatever page you want, embedded in Miro as the channel guide.

For people who want a co-branded player it's actually really easy. You just pretty much just send us a list of your feeds, and that's something we can put together for you. Another option is you also can make your channel guide page but that's not absolutely necessary. Really, if you send us a list of feeds, we can create a page for you on our guide that displays all your channels and it's a nice way that people can subscribe to you and that page will load up as the default channel guide when people start up Miro for the first time.

Yes, so we launched the offering with three initial partners: one of them is Deutsche Welle, the German public broacaster, kind of the German version of BBC world. The other was TedTalks, which probably a lot of your viewers are familiar with. And the last one is Revision3, the Internet TV project that the Digg guys are doing.

Revision3 just actually launched a player, I think maybe a week or a week and a half ago, and they're doing a really awesome job, promoting it on their site to their users, they did an awesome job with the design, they've really put it together in a really cool way.

So one way that people can see this Miro co-branded thing in action right now is to go to the Revision3 site.

Yeah, there's a page on our site about it. If you go to GetMiro.com, there's a banner just below the download box that you can check out and follow the link, and there're will be more information there including contact information.

We have a script that puts together a version of Miro that comes with a configuration file that includes the channels and the new guide URL, and the name definitely. And we're also letting people customize the icon as well. And then that spits out some download links that people can either download a copy of and host themselves or just link to it directly on their site, of versions of Miro whether it's for Mac or Windows.

Linux right now, the co-branding thing doesn't make quite as much sense because, you know, everyone installs Linux applications using a package manager or something like that and that's specific to each distribution and so it's not exactly the idea of like coming to a web page and downloading something and getting something.

It's only really, I mean, there's something that definitely does that but not everybody's doing it that way so we haven't really focused on the co-branded thing for Linux yet, but you got the Mac and Windows versions.

Yes, what right now people can do is they can make money by the use of Miro in two ways: they can do ads into the videos and they can do ads in the channel guide page. So if they want to make a web page for their own channel guide, the users will see that when they start up this custom version of Miro and they can do advertising, regular web advertising or video advertising in that space.

We have some more ad options in the works. Nothing's really totally finalized yet, so I don't know exactly what it's going to look like but there will be some ways in Miro for publishers to tell us "Yes, I want ads on my channel", and we'll be able to provide something like that for them. I'm not sure exactly what it's going to look like yet but we're interested in offering that to have a lot of people, we're interested in doing that, and I think part of that will let people, yeah, that generally stuff of working on includes making more advanced advertising options available for people using Miro.

Well right now it's in the name, so you can say "this is the MasterNewMedia co-branded Miro", you can be like just MasterNewMedia Miro or something like that, so you can insert your brand in the name or you can insert your name in the icon, I believe right now, and then you can also, you know, the main tool you have is you can make the guide page that everybody sees it when they start Miro whatever you want it to be, and that's just a webpage, that's a URL that can point wherever you want and that's something that really identifies and that will really determine the experience cause it's something that people see when they click on Miro.

Actually it's in Miro, but it's just a URL to your own page, if you want it to be, or you can point to our page, but if you want to really brand it you can make your own channel guide page there.

 
 
 
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posted by Robin Good on Thursday, April 3 2008, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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