Today's Most popular News

Source:Mashable!

Two companies I’ve long been fans of have hooked up their platforms to work together: Wizzard and TubeMogul. Wizzard Media is the media giant in the podcasting space, and TubeMogul is a video distribution service with one of the most adept, savvy and aware crews I’ve run into in their space.

In case you haven’t seen our coverage of TubeMogul in the past, their service is one that allows you to upload a video once and distribute it automatically to just about every embedded video site out there. TubeMogul has been furiously striking partnerships with a number of different sites where original video is created, including our video platform of choice Episodic.

For us, after a video is uploaded and tagged on Episodic’s server, it’s simply a one click process to blast the video out to YouTube, Revver, Yahoo’s Video, Google Video, and many others. This is the same functionality that Wizzard seems to now have implimented with the added bonus of integrating the analytics TubeMogul gathers from all these video repository into the stats package on their service.

Record Revenues at Wizzard

This news comes hot on the heels of more good financial news for Wizzard in their second quarter 2008 financial results. Their revenues for Q208 were just shy of $1.5 million, up 3% from Q207, and shaved $868,000 off their quarterly losses year over year, putting them a lot closer to operating in the black.

All the other key indicators for the business grew significantly as well, with total downloaded shows from Wizzard servers topping out at nearly a quarter of a billion downloads for just this quarter.

All in all, Wizzard continues to prove that there is money in podcasting, be it audio or video. Wizzard has always had a reputation for excelling in audio, but with podcasting itself making a comeback in trendiness, and Wizzard making a significant effort in the video side of their business, they should have a bright rest of the year ahead of them, particularly with the increased interest in video from the mainstream advertising community.

[Disclosure: Wizzard Media/LibSyn hosts the audio version of Mashable Conversations]

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Wizzard Media Publicly Traded on AMEXWizzard Media Joins the NavyTubeMogul Launches Cross-Network Video Tracking ToolTubeMogul Asks: Will Online Video Sell?Wizzard Releases Video Using Adobe Media PlayerWizzard Sees First Quarter Revenue Grow 130%TubeMogul Raises $1.5 Million from Lindzon and Knight’s Bridge

Source:Mashable!

Susan Bratton, the CEO of Personal Life Media (a lifestyle themed podcasting network), rang me up the other day to excitedly tell me about a new widget they’re releasing and announcing at the New Media Expo this week. Normally, I’m not a fan of widgets, as they tend to horribly slow down my web browsing experience on the shameful excuses for computers I use.

Susan knows about my disdain for most widgets, though, and quickly explained what was so great about this one.

“This player also supports the downloadable content development community by giving podcasters an easy way to promote their shows,” Susan told me. “Until we created this application, there were no multi-player audio widgets available on the market.”

There are probably a hundred and one variety of audio players out there, but when it comes down to easily embedding audio into a blog post, you’ve narrowed the field significantly. We tend to alternate here at Mashable between a few different solutions. We have a home grown solution that we sort of reverse engineered out of Google Reader, we occasionally use the Odeo player, and when we utilized Podango’s platform, we’d use their custom player.

All of these widgets lack the ability to do what the new PLM widget can do, which is showcase a podcast’s entire channel, as opposed to just one episode, and unlike many audio players is designed to be viral with easy embedding options. Embedding has always been something of a difficult matter in most blog CMS systems - the contortions we must go through to embed audio in our installation on Mashable make most us wish we were better at Yoga.

What gives this player an edge is it not only is designed for a single podcast situation, but is a player that can showcase “channels” of content, or multiple podcasts. There have been a number of podcast hosts playing with the channel concept from very early on in the podcast movement, most notably Podango, but none have offered a single web player that showcases the content thusly.

Another defining feature of the player widgets is the customization features available - your favorite color doesn’t have to be beige or grey. You can brand it with logos of your publication or even create, as Personal Life Media has done, players branded with sponsor images and logos as a value-add for advertisers.

Anyone interested in brewing up their own podcast widget, head on over to PLM’s widget creator. The widget is free to any producers, companies and fans.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:NBC Universal Hosting Virtual Concerts in Second LifeSecond Life: Open-source GridSexbed Stealer in Second Life LawsuitPeopleJam Launches Purpose-Driven Social NetworkNew App Merges Facebook and Second LifeDorm-Life Spoof of quarterlife…and Roommates, too.On-Demand Streaming for Second Life

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 7:31 am and is filed under News, san diego, Opinion, San Francisco-San Jose, personal life media, susan bratton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.