SplashCast, an embeddable Flash media player, is improving its product today. They are now allowing publishers to turn any RSS feed with a media enclosure, such as a podcast or videocast, into a channel on their player. Previously SplashCast only allowed RSS feeds from YouTube and Flickr. Now, any feed can be added.
The best way to understand SplashCast is just to look at the player, which we’ve embedded below. Feeds are organized into channels, making it possible to show your favorite videos, podcasts, and photos from within one player updated through RSS. SplashCast will continuously update the shows on the channel as new content is added.
Text based RSS feeds have had several multi-channel embeddable widget based platforms, including Grazr and SpringWidgets. Multi-channel video and audio RSS feeds are a smaller category, mostly consisting of widgets that play only your own content. Along with SplashCast, Cozmo.tv has been helping develop multi-channel video players updated via RSS, but only for social video sites YouTube and Blip.tv. VodPod has also released a new widget that plays RSS feeds of videos from social video sites.
This is great. We see many uses for this kind of system for our client base, nonprofits who are distributing their media across social networks and related websites. This is also along the lines of Fred Wilson’s 4 Rules of new media – “Microchunk it” – put your content into the smallest usable pieces. “Free It” – make it portable. “Syndicate it” – get it out to anyone and everyone who wants it, and “Monetize it” embed the monetization into the syndication so the ads go with the media. More from Fred here: http://avc.blog...uture_of_m.html
I love the first line of this post!
“SplashCast is improving its product today”.
Just fancy – all those companies out there that are not making a single improvement today. That must be what they are doing wrong.
The actual improvement sounds good – I am just amused by the choice of words ! (I think the news is that they have released an improved product today….)
Thanks for the review, Nick. Please feel free to leave any thoughts on how the product can be improved. We’re making lots of changes as fast as we can and really want to engage with the blogging and podcasting communities.
If you change to fast without monitoring those changes in real time – and for a significant amount of time.
– How do you know what changes made what impact?
– RB?
The concept sounds interesting, too bad the site became a victim of its own success: The streams are all buffering terribly!
This still needs work. While on the surface, I think I understand the benefit, it’s still not clear exactly why I’d want to do this. Also the set up is confusing. What’s the difference between a show and a channel, for example? Keep going, but try to pay close attention to these details… they’ll make or break you.
If I understand what it is doing correctly for video, it will download the enclosure from RSS (in this case, most like a QT video), transcode it to flash video (flv) and then host it from the Splashcast site. This, essentially, strips the publisher from any analytics, dynamic builds or targeting that could occur. In addition, it would not allow for the content producer to update the content over time.
There is a great deal of functionality that companies add to enhance user value as well as value to advertisers. They are, but not limited to, analytics based on content segments actually viewed, click through overlays, interaction, dynamic video builds based on a variety of criteria and real time analytics. Whether those features are built through Windows Media, Quicktime or Flash, they would be removed by Splashcast.
I believe this is a major problem — one for which Podshow and Odeo were both berated for. I have an e-mail in to Marshall and hope that they have a solution beyond hosting the content themselves.
Just wondering–can one set multiple categories each with “unlimited” channels -anyone know? (did i miss it)
Whew, what a day! Lots of very good feedback and a number of concerns. Brain (and anyone else thinking about such matters) – we’ll be making a post following up the first day’s discussion Tuesday morning on http://splashcastmedia.com
Thanks!
Nick,
This is Don from SpringWidgets.
Thanks for the mention!
The SpringWidgets RSS reader has had support for video RSS feeds since it’s inception and we get quite a bit of use by people who have put video enabled feeds into our reader since the videos play directly in the reader widget.
Here is an example that I created from a Google video search RSS feed.
http://tinyurl.com/3crful
We also support Podcasts and OPML.
wowww…really nice service..I should try this one..thanks..