Plugins: Video for WordPress, vidavee

Posted on April 2, 2007
Filed Under plugins, demo area, interviews |

vidavee-logo.gifvidavee has released a new plugin aiming to make life easy for the WordPress blogger looking to feature video. It seems to be aimed very much at managing your own video, rather than a youtube / revver approach of linking to other peoples videos.

I asked Anthony Umann of vidavee a few questions about the plugin before testing it out. First off, who are vidavee?

Vidavee provides a b2b on-demand video as a service for leading web publishers and web publishing framework companies. In business since 2004, delivering millions of video’s a day through our channel partners.

So why a WordPress plugin?

We’re investigating mainstream blog frameworks such as wordpress. The wordpress plugin is meant to be as simple as possible and as we learn more about what the community wants and we will expand the feature set.

So what stage is the plugin at? Super early beta? Pretty much done beta?

We currently have a hundred or so wordpress users that signed up, it’s an unadvertised open beta environment. Anyone can install the plug-in without limitation.

The vidavee site showcases a few prominent bloggers using the service, with some technorati top 100 among them. I finished our quick interview by asking whether the WordPress plugin would offer full functionality, or was just an attempt to grab some blogger attention:

All of the features we offer to our channel partners will be offered to wordpress; reporting, vtagging (segment selection and sharing), graffiti (interactive timeline objects on the video), vidavee ads (connection to third party ad servers), and numerous social networking functions (including RSS as they become available.

Which, of course, is the right answer.

I’ve tested it out, and the system really is very straightforward to use. Three minutes into using it I had this video…

… up and running. The process of uploading and embedding a video was smooth, with the only part likely to stumble some users being the need to collect a key from vidavee for your installation. I’d suggest adding a direct link to this to the activation confirmation for the plugin.

The process was very simple, involving perhaps half a dozen clicks to upload and embed my video. And the code is much simpler than the typical flash embed video, and mistakes are handled well producing a useful failure message rather than breaking your page code. Once installed the process is no more complicated than adding an image to your post (and follows an almost identical process).

(the video is a timelapse I made earlier this year of some Scottish morning rolls raising and baking - email me for the recipe if you want it, they were tasty).

Link to wordpress plugin, and vidavee showcase. My thanks to Anthony Umann of vidavee for his time.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Comments

4 Responses to “Plugins: Video for WordPress, vidavee”

  1. Experiments: Video minisite : Wordpress guy on April 2nd, 2007 2:02 pm

    […] above widget (if it works) is more complex to implement than the vivadee wordpress videos covered earlier, but provide a very different function. You can embed these for any channel, not […]

  2. Sally Hunter on April 3rd, 2007 5:31 am

    wow… that’s very cool. Easy to install and I can upload and stream video as if it is my own, no more link back to youtube. Did you play with the options, there is a pre-roll option for your own video ads. needs reporting.

  3. Tom Gilley on April 3rd, 2007 12:25 pm

    Thank you for your review. We adopted your suggestion and put link to key in plug-in activation text. Sally: We have reporting for our channel partners and will release reporting for wordpress users soon.

  4. Matt Ellsworth on April 7th, 2007 8:15 am

    Looks great - I’ve been looking for something like this because youtube and google video compress and make my videos look ugly… so hopefully this will help..

Leave a Reply