VideoApps – Interactive online video applications

Video on the web has gone a long way from the thumbnail image linking to a file for download. For several years already people can go to a web page and watch video directly into it, without need to download, install and actually do anything else. That’s largely due to Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash). Flash has gone a long way too through the last years. My daily job is to implement ways for video to be used in our Streaming Service (the modern term is OVP – Online Video Platform) and the latest cool thing we’ve released is VideoApps Studio.

VideoApps Studio allows you to build your own interactive video applications and use them in your website. That’s nice indeed you can do stuff in 15 min most flash designers can’t do at all, here’s the really good stuff though:

You can use the full array of services in the SVP video platform – auto uploads, auto encoding, publishing API, live and on-demand content, presentation slides … and so on. You can’t do that with a custom flash application unless you own a CDN. That’s why such solutions only exist in portal sites with enough infrastructure to support it all. Now you can.

With VideoApps you can scale. It is a huge problem to build a video website supporting many simultaneous visitors. Even if you use a CDN for the video your own site has to scale too to deliver the other content. VideoApps does that for you and it’s predictable and very affordable.

It’s even possible to do SEO with VideoApps based website through it’s direct link support. Try that with any other dynamically built flash application

You can import your own flash plugins into the application. You can create a voting plugin that gives 0-5 flowers.. or add animation to the background.. or make a game. That also means that you can connect the video application to your own database and provide information and get feedback on your own.

Enough talk here’s a simple example:

That’s basically a TV channel application and it’s actually available as one of the common templates. TV Channels are the most common use for videoapps, however there are no restrictions on what you can build with the engine, surely it’s a bit heavy for just a single player, but anything richer in content or social data can be built and this may be an efficient way to do it.

Speaking of building here’s a screen from the builder(runs in a browser):

The builder allows you to create new video applications or just make a few changes in a template. You can also modify applications that are already published live without need to go to the web pages and change code there!

Here’s a short video introduction to VideoApps Studio. VideoApps Studio is available to all users of StreamingVideoProvider.com using plans SoHo+ or above.

I intend to add a bit more info on some of the non obvious features of the videoapps engine and some more specific ways to use it as soon as I get some free time(which seems to be a problem lately). In the mean time SVP crew is adding tutorials and templates to the library so information will become easier to obtain with time Comments and questions are welcome!