Digital & Social Media Consulting in Tampa Florida

Do you remember the last time you uploaded a video to YouTube?  How long would you say the process took?  If your video was of any length, it probably took about 20 min or more to upload and you probably spent about 5 minutes filling in the title, description, and tags.  Now if you wanted to upload your videos to more sites than just YouTube, you’d have to repeat that process for each video venue.  This could be a pretty daunting task for video bloggers or online video producers that want to upload a new video everyday across ten different outlets.  Hours would be wasted just watching the upload progress bar on your screen. In today’s “live by the minute” world, if there is something that is far too time consuming, you can be sure that a new business will be there the following day with a solution to your problem.  Enter TubeMogul.  TubeMogul, an online video analytics and distribution company, has a service called Load & Track.  It allows publishers of all sizes to upload a video one time and publish it to as many as 22 different video portals with one click.  While word of this service took a while to get to me since its debut in July of 2007, I’m sure glad it finally did.  I had a chance to use the service on a recent marketing campaign and it proved to be a gift from the time saving gods.

After entering all of my login credentials for each site, I typed in my video details then published it instantly to YouTube, Metacafe, Revver, DailyMotion, Veoh, Vimeo, and Yahoo.   I let it run its upload process while I got a bite to eat.  When I got back, I checked each video site and sure enough, my video successfully made it to each of the sites I had selected.  Awesome.

If you’re a frequent video publisher you should check them out.  You’ll be joining some familiar faces such as Fred, Hot For Words, Athene Wins, Barely Political, and Philip DeFranco who currently make up TubeMogul’s Top 5 users.  For the more advanced users, they also have some pretty cool analytics features such as graphs and pie charts to help you track performance and compare trends across different sites.

Most of us are beyond frustrated with television these days.  If you’re a cable or satellite subscriber, you’ve probably had it with service outages and expensive monthly rates.  If you still get broadcast TV, you probably only get three channels and are confused about what to do for the switch to digital in 2009 (maybe).  If you’re an online video fanatic like myself, then you’ve been watching video online for some time now.  You’ve probably searched for something comparable to cable television but without the frustration and costs.  You may have come across services that either have tricky downloads and plug-ins or have fees associated with them.  All of the video search sites with streaming video are great, but they don’t simply entertain us like regular TV used to.  You have to work to find the videos you are interested in seeing. I’ve come across an online television service based right here in Baltimore that may be the answer to all of these issues.  Tidal TV, still in Beta, offers free, streaming, online television that entertains you based on the networks that you like.  They are not the first to provide this type of service.  Joost and Hulu are already established in this market, but have differences that I may discuss in a later post.   Tidal currently offers content from networks such as Discovery, National Geographic, CBS, and HGTV.

In their own words: “For the on-the-go and in-control viewer, Tidal TV offers a unique broadband television platform featuring the best in professionally produced, branded programming. There is no application to download, no waiting for videos to load, no fees to pay –Tidal TV provides its audience with a high-quality viewing experience that, like TV, is always “on.”"

I have to say I was pretty impressed.  I was entertained and I actually enjoyed the content.  Now nothing is really “free” so there are short commercials that will interrupt your viewing experience every now and then.  But a 15 second commercial is easy to tolerate when you’re not paying for cable programming. I recommend giving Tidal TV a try and hooking it up to your LCD TV.  You may end up canceling your cable service.