Miro was created through open source and a group of volunteers and it has remained stable for a few years now.
People can download the Miro player to their desktop computer and watch their programs like a TV if they like, or they can go to the site. You can create your own channel/profile, which is what we did and that is then offered up to the community and aggregated through Miro. We don’t get a lot of views through Miro, but we get steady views.
We RSS to Miro from Blip.tv, which isn’t that difficult to do. That way we get the videos on Blip and Miro at the same time, which saves time.
Tech support is not always reliable, but there’s a good-hearted group of people in the community that are willing to help each other.
We have a contract with Spike which is very important to us. Spike, at one point, took our profile down as being too commercial in nature. But, we wrote a letter and sent it snail mail to their corporate office giving them reasons why we thought we should be allowed on Spike TV. I really thought I’d never hear back from them. We’d done this with other sites and had not been successful. But, one day my phone rang and it was someone from Spike TV corporate. They had reviewed our letter and were in agreement that we belonged there! Imagine my surprise!
They gave us special producer rights so that our videos would always be accepted there and we didn’t have to worry about the profile or any of our videos being rejected or deleted.
Spike TV has a great audience and the site is very well managed. The site is incredibly professional, entertaining and engaging. It brings in a lot of people who want entertainment and that means more eyes on our videos. Spike is, of course, tied to Spike TV so there’s that cross over audience for broadcast as well. Since this is the direction COS wants to go having the internet/broadcast tie-in is very appealing to us.
We get a decent number of views. Spike has a lot of different types of shows it offers online so we get a good variety of viewer types. I do find that if a book video has anything in it that is tied to a movie, television show, celebrity or current affairs it tends to do better.
Zoopy (www.zoopy.com) is relatively new for us, but we’ve been very happy with the results. Like many sites that came before it, Zoopy wasn’t sure what to do with us. They deleted our profile, then we contacted them, and they put the profile back up. And we all lived happily ever after. Okay, that’s not really the end of the story.
Zoopy allows for 200mb upload limit which is double what most sites will allow. So our longer form videos and original shows are perfect for this site. We do send all of our videos to Zoopy and are considered “content providers” and professional producers.
I love the stability Zoopy seems to have. They have a sizable staff, have grown over the years, offer mobile and TV options for videos and the site is well done. This is definitely one to watch in the coming years as it seems to constantly evolve itself to stay current with audience needs and wants.
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Veoh.
In the beginning I loved it. We even used Veoh players in our Reader’s Entertainment TV site (www.readersentertainment.tv). We could assign players, move the videos around at will within a player, it was amazing! I got to know the staff at Veoh and they were amazing too.
Then, things began to change. They got a lot of investment money and started re-working the site. I didn’t mind the additional advertising at all. They have to make a living and stay viable. But, some of the unique features, like the individual player channels changed into “groups” and we were not able to use the function as we did before. Okay, sometimes someone else’s progress doesn’t necessarily work best for you, but the problem I had with it was that they gave absolutely no warning about this change. Those of us using their service just woke up one day to find we had to change over to Blip or YouTube players.
Sometime last year the site stopped working all together. There were press articles about how Veoh had not used their investment money wisely and though I don’t know if that’s true I do know that the site no longer worked. So, for a while we just gave up on it.
Then, more recently, I noticed it was working again and that the site had been updated. I didn’t get any emails about it from Veoh, though I’ve had my videos with them since the started.
I like the new look and I’m hoping Veoh will survive. I don’t trust Veoh enough to use their players on our site again, at least not for a while. But, I noticed we have an ever-increasing number of video views coming from Veoh and that is a very nice surprise indeed!
