Friday 17 April 2009

Improving the video section of my site

I've been working for a little while on improving the video section of sosolid2k.co.uk, it'll be quite different than it is at the moment, as any member of the site will be able to submit their videos for people to watch, rather than it only showing my videos.

The basic structure of it is almost complete, it's currently possible to submit videos from Youtube and watch them, but I've not finished anything to do with finding videos yet. I'll be transforming the main video page into a place to sort and categorize videos based on stats, like views, ratings and type of video etc over different periods of time.

Once most of the basic features are available, I'll release it and then work on finishing up the more obscure parts that aren't really required but are useful (such as support for video sites other than Youtube, integrating a users videos into their profile etc).

I'm also going to be doing some sort of 'partner' thing, like a lot of video sites do, where users who create good videos will be able to put their own adverts next to their videos. I'm still checking out the terms of use for some of the site to see which of them allow this to be done with their embedded videos. Unfortunately Youtube isn't one of them, so I think sites like Revver and others would need to be used for this (would be better anyway, as users get adverts in their videos as well as at the side). Non-partners will not have ads on their videos, and only copyright-free videos can be used to earn money if accepted. Due to age restrictions of the advertising companies only users 18 or over will be able to participate in the partner program. 

I'm hoping it will give a good place for Runescapers to find and watch good Runescape videos as the 'top' videos will be Runescape videos and not a mix of random stuff from every different type of video you can think of.

Here's an example of the video viewing page, I'll likely tweak it around a bit before release, and still need to get everything working, but it's close enough to what it will be like - http://www.sosolid2k.co.uk/view-video.php?v=OuUueuYk0z8

I'll also be altering the navigation for the site to accommodate drop down menus and streamline it a bit.

Thanks for reading ^.^

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