So... as you guys know we've been making a bunch of changes to the video section. Its been slow going, but we're constantly looking to improve it for you guys, and we're getting much closer with every day.
Now, I know that the new flash section is still in beta, but we're getting much closer to a production launch of it. Based on your feedback, we have upped the quality, removed the watermark, and are working to tweak the page layout. Big change there will be that we're going to use the old list for the gallery instead of the new thumbnail grid layout.
Our most exciting change comes on the homepage. This will come in a few different stages, but basically we were realising that you guys are uploading so many awesome videos, that we wanted to give them exposure. Plus when we added videos, it was taking a lot of time, and they weren't switching up as much as we wanted.
Now, the system will be putting up a new video every day at noon. This video will be one of two things:
1) The top rated user video from yesterday. Thats right... get your videos up and get 'em rated!
2) A video selected by us. If we get a new episode of Chug life, the Jon Videoblog, or a fresh episode of NSTV it'll be put in that section.
We're pretty excited for this, and think its going to work really well. Take a look at a screen capture from our development site:
Some of you might say "but I liked the big thumbnail!" - don't fret. Having a big thumbnail automatically generated required a bit more work, so in a couple of weeks instead of 5 videos, the first one will be a big thumbnail and the last two will be links to the previous two videos.
You might ask - "But there's no player... how am I going to watch them?"
This is the part that I'm really excited about. Since our NSTV page has basically sucked a nut for the whole time it was up, we wanted to revamp that. So when you click on the link to each video, you will be brought directly to the
www.newschoolers.tv page. This page will have all the top rated videos listed in order, with commenting below and view counts being tracked. You'll be able to watch them all in one big playlist, and comment on your favorites while they're playing.
Check it:
If you're a video uploader, the video's homepage will track how many people have peeped your video, and hold the same set of comments as were added under the NSTV top rated video page.
The one big thing to note here, is that foreign embed videos WILL NOT WORK with this system. You need to upload your video directly to newschoolers. This is a change that has been coming for a long time, and we've been drastically trying to improve our video system so that you guys post everything directly on the site.
We are eventually going to be disabling the ability to embed foreign video code in our video section. We will only do this for our video section, you will still be able to post them everywhere else. I'm sure many of you are about to scroll to the bottom and post some hateful comment, but please think about it from our perspective. We can't use any of the foreign videos in our gallery. We can't link them together in cool ways like that, and we can't use them as part of the site.
Youtube doesn't allow you to upload vimeo videos, and we simply won't be able to offer features like this if we did the same.
To make sure that uploading vids to newschoolers is of a quality that is comparable to other sites you use, we're constantly going to be upping the quality of our video system. We've increased uploads to 200mb, and will work on getting this number higher. We're going to be adding a progress bar so that you know exactly how long your video is going to take. We're working on the layout of the actual video page so that its a lot smoother to use. We'll be frequency capping advertisements so that you're not bombarded with them, plus working to utilize cooler units like overlays and other fun stuff.
Remember, the bottom line of this is that we feel that you, the community of newschoolers has a ton of amazing talent, and we want to work to showcase that alongside the professional videos that we recieve all the time.
As always, your suggestions and feedback are always appreciated. We do listen, and make our decisions based on it.
-Doug
