I couple of months back I started duncanriley.tv, my experiment in video. I got some great advice from folks like Chris Pirillo, then ignored most of it and started doing stuff. It was great fun, and some of the videos received thousands of views on Youtube. Most didn’t, but using Tubemogul most hit low to mid 3 figures across a range of services.
And then I sort of stopped.
It’s not due to any dislike in creating videos. I love doing them. The issue was time. Not the time to do the video, the time to do the video, convert it, upload it to Tubemogul, wait for that to work (at it’s been getting slower and slower lately, free service so I shouldn’t complain, but still…) then post one of them to the site. It became a chore.
But I haven’t really stopped doing video. I just switched to an easier tool. Despite some of my earlier skepticism, that tool is Seesmic. Although to be fair, I’m also doing the occasional video to Phreadz as well (and I’ll do a lot more once they open it up for anyone to register, Kosso is great value, and it’s a quality site).
Why Seesmic? It’s easy. It’s easy to jump onto Seesmic and record a video straight to the site. Loic has taken the recording, encoding, uploading etc out of making video. With the new embeds that allow people to respond, Seesmic has become a one stop shop for interactive video.
Once upon a time I would hate to say this, but I like it as well.
I did some videos recently with my son. He loves doing Seesmic videos. We started at one. Two days later Loic emails me to tell me that the video was the second most watched video on Seesmic that day. WTF, ROFL, and LOL were some of my initial reactions. Then I went back and did some more. And like a junkie I keep going back. The key thing: easy, quick, not time consuming.
There is something missing.
I still need a tool that will give me Seesmic recording functionality with the distribution of Tubemogul. In this day and age you have to be on YouTube, and it helps if you’re on 8 other sites as well. It doesn’t help that YouTube’s quick capture facility completely and utterly sucks arse. I tried to record a video there tonight, it was an unwatchable, pixelated mess. This is an opportunity waiting to happen for a new startup, or existing service: do your video capture locally, but distribute it. Blip.tv is an obvious candidate, great service, but no local recording. But even Seesmic, or Phreadz. Cut you video, have it pumped out to other services.
So for the few people who subscribed to duncanriley.tv, apologies. I should start putting my Seesmic videos up. It was fun while it lasted. I’ll do something with the site eventually. In the mean time, follow me on Seesmic, or you can watch the latest vids in the sidebar here at duncanriley.com
