Slide into our soft opening by soundguy

3/1/193/1/19

Link

Tagged n/a

Report

soundguy

Seattle & Vegas

O.G. Admin

Posts

Big News! Vidown/The Mothership is now in the streaming game! We've built a shiny new streaming system over the top of our existing Vidown download stores. The new system lives at

Vidown.tv

We have spent the last couple of months building this and it's finally up and running. We are calling this a "soft opening" because there are just a handful of sites available right at this moment. Additional sites are being added as they are converted. Since we have a decade and a half of vendors uploading all kinds of weird video formats, most of which are now obsolete, we decided that the best way to do this would be to standardize on the HTML5 video player element and reprocess every one of the 40,000 clips in the existing system into nice clean MP4 with streaming enabled. As you might guess, this is taking a LOOOOOONG time, especially since we have a bunch of stores with more than 1000 videos in them. We will be finishing and adding a few more every day, so keep checking the portal. Note that this is not a mandatory system, so not all of your favorite Vidown producers will be participating.

Because the market is going to be mostly mobile devices, (which have much smaller screens and may have severe traffic limits when using a data plan instead of wifi) we have decided the best plan is to stream smaller versions of each file rather than the originals. This will also keep our costs down. SD files are the same dimensions, but HD and 4K have been downsized to something more suitable for mobile. They still look good on most desktop/laptop screens too. One nice feature of the player is that you can single-click the video to start/stop and double-click to expand to full screen. There are also buttons for these functions.

The individual streaming catalogs have a lot less info than the download interface because many of the fields are just not relevant in this context. The year and length are there and so are the keywords so you can sort thru large catalogs quickly (assuming the producer used the keyword feature appropriately) In every catalog, there is a Buy button on the left sidebar that leads to the purchase system. If a vendor has more than one site set up for streaming, you will see options for all of those sites. There may also be options for groups of sites at a discounted rate. We are giving producers the ability to create 30, 60, or 90 day passes. The payment system accepts Visa, MC, and Discover cards. Vendors who accept alternative payment methods can also create a pass manually. CC purchases can be one-shot or recurring. You decide when you sign up. Passes expire at midnight PST (GMT -8) of the 30th/60th/90th day regardless of what time of day you made the purchase.

We are requiring a valid email address to use this system and you will be asked to provide a password as well. Streaming links don't exist until a valid login has occurred. Once logged in, a button will appear in each listing.

This is not the ultimate final version of the interface, but it's enough to get the ball rolling. Over the next few months, it will be changed around in response to user feedback and to make it more mobile friendly.

The new UMD rules disallow bumping strategies like withholding info and posting it later, but I swear new sites are coming online every few hours and I'll update the thread as it happens. Legit as Shit!!!

Ok, then. Lets do this!

Slide In

3/1/193/1/19