Many independent online
publishers have long held a wish to be able to upload video clips to
more than one video sharing site at a time.
The exposure and traffic building potential of posting unique
and high quality video clips is a very effective tool, and the ability
to upload to multiple video sharing sites all at once would be a
welcome addition to any webmaster’s tools.
To surf the word of mouth wave, and achieve
viral
visibility, your video content need to be uploaded to as many
publishing video sharing sites as possible.
A New Service from Particle-S
A new online web-based
service, from the super prolific guys at Particle-S, makes this process
super easy and completely free.
As the Internet does not offer one unique video distribution
site to
publish and expose your video content, as an independent web video
publisher you need to take into account that not all of your potential
viewers will be found on a single video sharing site (e.g.: YouTube).
And so, while it certainly it makes good sense to upload your
clips on
YouTube, you need
to be aware of tens of high visibility video sharing and distribution
sites available out there.
Whether you want to
market
your business using social media, promote
your website, or make sure that your video blog or Internet
TV show lives up to its true potential, the key to success is
viral
video
marketing.
Far more effective than simply throwing money at
advertising, viral video marketing ensures that your video gets seen,
and shared, again and again.
Until now this has involved a
tedious process of
manually uploading your video to as many services as you have the
energy to, which can make for an exhausting and time consuming process
if you publish video with any regularity.
There have also been some
tools
to
handle this automatically,
but they all cost a minimum of one hundred dollars or more.
So it is with some excitement that I review the latest service
from Particle-S,
a simple way of getting your videos published to a vast range of online
video sharing destinations from a single upload.
Here are the details:
Hey!Spread – Overview
Hey!Spread
is the latest service offered by the
Particle-S team, who
have previously brought to market the easy video podcasting tool Hey!Cast and the
excellent online transcoding service Hey!Watch, as
enthusiastically
reviewed by Robin Good on these very pages.
This latest addition to a growing
range of useful
web publishing tools is going to be very thankfully received by those
publishing video with any regularity.
Whether you want to make sure
that all of your friends and colleagues can see your video from their
favorite video sharing network, or perhaps more importantly to give
your video productions the maximum exposure, Hey!Spread looks like it
has the answer.
The service, which is free to use at the time of writing, is
all
about taking the torture out of spreading the reach of your video right
from the word go. As the Particle-S
team note of their product:
”For now, spreading videos is something
extremely boring and time consuming. Actually, It is not convenient to
upload to more than two networks. All must be hand-made, so that limits
the distribution potential and the exposure. In one word, the BUZZ. And
this lack of visibility considerably reduces the impact of any web
campaigns.”
And buzz is what it’s all about
when it comes to
viral video marketing. Whatever your product, service or production,
there are few people that are going to want to limit the amount of
people that come into contact with it.
We recently
looked at Mobuzz TV,
an online video channel that have risen to success not least for their
excellent provision of multiple video download formats, and use of
multiple publishing destinations.
Adding to the already cool capabilities of Hey!Watch,
Hey!Spread might
well prove to be a must-use service for serious web publishers. I will
certainly be adding it to my arsenal of tools.
The Process
The process of getting your videos out there using Hey!Spread
is very straightforward and will take you through everything you need
to do in the space of 4 screens and a few short minutes of your time.
The first screen asks you for the
standard title,
description, tags and category. Once you have filled in those details,
you can set about uploading your video
Step two is where you fill in
your user name and
login details for the accounts you have up and running. Hey!Spread has
a good range of video services up there, and this looks to be expanding
at quite an impressive rate.
Obviously if you don’t already have accounts with the ten
services
on offer, you are going to have a slightly longer setting up process
the first time around, but obviously this is only going to catch you
once, as from then on you will be able to use Hey!Spread as your
intermediary.
There is no obligation, however, to send your video to all of
the
services, and you can use Hey!Spread with as little as one service from
the list, even if that does somewhat defeat the purpose.
In step three you give Hey!Spread
an email address.
Once all of your videos have been uploaded to the requisite services,
you will receive a notification email telling you that your upload was
successful, and in some cases any services that you failed to upload to.
And that’s it. From there, you
need to leave your
browser window open while the video uploads.
I found the process of
uploading my video faster than some of the services themselves, which
was a pleasant surprise. Obviously this will depend on the size of
video you are uploading.
Finally when the uploading
process is complete, you
receive an on screen notification, which lets you know that you can now
close your browser window.
Your email will follow, as often the video
services involved take a few minutes to
transcode
your video into their native Flash format.
In short, then, this is a super
easy process, which
gets even easier once you are signed-up for the different services
offered by Hey!Spread.
In the space of about five minutes you can have
your video clip up and running on ten different services rather than
one, which is a great way to save yourself some time in my humble
opinion.
Line Up Of Video Sharing Sites Supported
It looks as if Hey!Spread is
managing to add video
sharing networks at an impressive rate, as they have already vastly
improved their line-up since the recent launch of the service.
Bear in
mind that you will need to sign up to any of the services you wish to
make use of in the first instance.
At the time of writing Hey!Spread will upload your video to
the following services:
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Google Video
- Yahoo! Video
- Dailymotion
- Blip.tv
- metacafe
- Photobucket
- bolt
- Putfile
This makes for an impressive line-up
and covers all
of the major bases that immediately spring to mind. Certainly there are
always going to be more networks, as the number currently competing out
there continues to grow.
It looks like Hey!Spread is growing its range
at a good rate, however, so it is likely that if your favorite service
is not included at the moment that it might well be in the near future.
In terms of supported formats, the range is slightly less
impressive. I can only assume, given the huge range of formats
supported by Hey!Watch
that this
is due to a need to comply with the compatibility of all of the
services involved, knocking out any contenders that don’t translate
across to all of the services included in the
Hey!Spread line-up.
The supported formats are:
Again, this covers the basics, and while it could be extended
will
probably suit most needs. The only other limitation to bear in mind –
once more likely in compliance to certain video sharing service rules –
is that your clips are no more than 100Mb in size or 10 minutes in
running time.
How Is it Free?
Unlike Hey!Watch
which is a paid, per-video service, Hey!Spread is for
the time being at least free to use.
So how do the developers make money from it? The answer, it
would
seem, is by charging the video sharing sites themselves a one off fee
for including them within the services offered by Hey!Spread.
This seems to be working out for
them considering
the current line up of services signed up to the service, and it looks
as if Hey!Spread is committed to adding more services to their roster
in the future, judging by their open
invitation for video networks to join up.
I hope that this will prove to be a sustainable business
model, as I
imagine that Hey!Spread will be seeing some serious use in the coming
months.
Conclusions
Hey!Spread
is a very welcome
service that is going to make regular video publishers and viral
marketers very happy indeed.
I have personally been waiting for
something like this to come along for quite some time, and the fact
that it is free to use is great news indeed.
Like Hey!Watch
before it, Hey!Spread
is likely to be successful because of its combination of simplicity,
ease-of-use and the fulfillment of a genuine need in the
marketplace.
Sure, presentation is threadbare and the interface extremely
minimal,
but to me this is not so much a problem as it is an issue of
focus.
By
putting all of their energies into making a foolproof tool for
achieving a specific goal, the Particle-S
team have done an excellent job.
Okay, the limitations imposed by allowing you to upload to a
good
range of video sharing services are a little irritating – knocking out
the potential to upload video in some popular formats, such as MP4,
which I tried and failed to use the service with.
The limit of 100Mb or
10 minutes running time for your video file, while stated by several
sites, doesn’t apply to all, but obviously to fulfill the need to
upload to all services this has to be applied.
Nevertheless, minor drawbacks
aside, this is a
small price to pay for being able to get your video published to so
many video sharing sites in record quick time.
Video bloggers, Internet TV producers, viral marketers and
avid web
video publishers are all going to find themselves drawn to this simple,
cool service if they know what’s good for them. I will personally be
among them.
Additional Resources
If you would like to learn more about Hey!Spread and
Particle-S, you might want to check out the following links:
- The Hey!Spread
website - Hey!Spread
help page - Developer Particle-S blog
and Twitter presence - Tech
Crunch coverage by Duncan Riley
Michael Pick is a contributing author discussing broadband video tools and software. His work can be found on MasterNewMedia. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
