Overview
The Vidiac platform is a full featured video portal giving viewers, content
creators and site owners a comprehensive tool to upload, view, share,
manage, comment and moderate videos. Vidiac channel
sites are a network of partners that manage video portals under
their own web site address and branding. Vidiac works in conjunction
with these site owners to provide their users a complete video service.
Expertise
Vidiac is deployed on over 40 web sites and currently manages well over 40,000 videos. Launching on Valentines Day of 2005 we have scaled to over 1,000,000 videos streamed a day and constantly create new features and functionality to offer a competitive product to attract new users.
Every day we receive hundreds of videos onto the system and now average close to 3,000 new videos submitted every week. Because of the design of our management interface and moderation capabilities we are able to screen submissions for inappropriate content quickly and remove such videos from the system.
Vidiac Features
Video Encoding
Users submit videos in any of dozens of different formats from MPEG1/2/4, Divx, 3ivx, Windows Media 7/8/9, Quicktime, Fraps, On2 VP3-7. These videos are at varying bit rates up to 10 Mbps. The vast majority of these videos are not in a format that can readily be streamed and must be converted to a common format to ensure a good experience for the user.
Vidiac has standardized on Windows Media 9 at 225 and 400kbps, which is auto selected based on the user's available bandwidth. Additionally offer Flash 8 based on On2's VP6 codec at 528kbps. Users will be able to toggle between the player of their choice.
Secure Streaming
Using a proprietary token based system we are able to effectively prevent users from taking direct links to our videos and sharing with friends, thus bypassing advertising.
User Uploads
Users can easily sign up for an account and upload their videos and be notified via email after the video has been encoded into WM9 and Flash and is ready for viewing.
RSS Feed
All videos that are uploaded and approved for viewing are automatically placed in an RSS feed that users can subscribe to. This will allow them to quickly see when new videos show up on the site, resulting in significant repeat traffic.
API
Vidiac's extensible API (application programming interface) allows us to expose our entire list of videos, comments and user database for sites that wish to build their own Vidiac based applications.
Advertising Support
Vidiac can either run with or without advertising depending on the needs of the Site Owner. Additionally Site Owners wishing to run advertising are allowed to use our existing advertising engine and dynamic insertion technology.
Vidiac has been certified to run video ads from Eyeblaster, Eyewonder, Unicast (Viewpoint), Instream (Lightningcast), Broadband Enterprises, and in process with Klipmart. In addition custom in-stream ads can be placed in the system without the need for working with any third parties.
Additionally third party banner ads are fully supported.
User Comments
Users have the ability to comment on individual videos. Users' email addresses are verified before any post is made and vulgar language is automatically removed. All user comments can be easily edited or deleted by administrators.
User Ratings
Users can rate a video on scale of 1 to 5 stars and the results are automatically updated throughout the day allowing users to easily spot videos that others feel is the best.
Moderation
One of the largest concerns with any system that accepts user submissions is the certainty that users will upload copyrighted or inappropriate content. Normally this is a very time consuming process resulting in administrators being required to watch each video.
Currently Vidiac manages over 1,500 hours of content and has devised a system to allow the moderation of video submissions at a significantly greater rate that would normally be allowed.
System Reporting
Reports are available on how many videos have been streamed and how many total videos are in the system. Additionally we individually monitor each server for CPU, memory, and disk usage along with other individual processes.
Error Notification
Our error notification system automatically emails administrators information on any errors and in the event of a complete system outage will send notifications to cell phones.
Hottest Uploads
Our experience has shown that simply showing videos that have been matched the most over time results in a very stale home page, ultimately resulting in users becoming bored and not returning. The hottest uploads are calculated hourly to expose content that has been watched the most recently.
Folders
As a system grows with new content it is very easy for content to get buried. Our system automatically places videos into pre-defined folders based on specific keywords or tags.
Replication
In order to effectively scale a system with a large amount of content new assets need to be brought online as quickly as possible. Vidiac's platform is designed to scale content across those assets to provide the best user experience possible.
Skinning
Vidiac's skinning system allows design changes to be made rapidly. Additionally multiple skins can be setup for different aspects of the site.
Sharing
Multiple sharing options are given to users who want to share videos on message forums, blogs or their own personal web pages, while still giving the original site complete control over their content along with related advertising revenue.