This really has no place on a corporate blog. But then again, it does.

Peter King talks about the feel good story of this NFL season, in reference to the Denver Broncos:

” Whether Denver’s a championship team or not — and allowing an insane 6.5 points per game through four weeks suggests they’ll battle San Diego for the AFC West title — there’s one thing you have to love about the Broncos: They’ve got a Patriot way (what a coincidence!) of tuning out the outside crappola and focusing on the only thing that matters — the next play. They tuned out the Jay Cutler thing. They tuned out the Brandon Marshall distraction. That’s not easy in an NFL-crazy market like Denver, but McDaniels did it. “DO YOUR JOB” is the gigantic wall art in the Broncos’ team meeting room, something McDaniels brought with him from New England and his mentor, Bill Belichick. And it’s what his players are doing.

Now let’s do a mini-analysis of the biggest decision of the off-season, Denver dealing Cutler for two first-rounders and Kyle Orton. It reminds me of the Patriots dealing Drew Bledsoe in 2002 and handing the quarterback job long-term to Tom Brady. Bledsoe, the independent-thinking mad bomber; Brady, the caretaker who’ll follow the gameplan to a T. Just substitute Cutler for Bledsoe and Kyle Orton for Brady and you’ve got McDaniels’ line of thinking. Now, I’m not saying (and McDaniels wouldn’t either) that Orton’s going to morph into Brady, but the amount of negative plays at the quarterback position has been exactly what McDaniels has preached: zero interceptions, zero lost fumbles, six sacks. If Orton continues on his present pace — 3,624 passing yards, 20 touchdowns, 59 percent passing (that should be a tick better) — the Broncos will be playing in January.”

That’s exactly right: DO YOUR JOB.

(P.S.: Thanks for the pointer, Riff)

Good news!

We just added in H.264 support today, and moved away from FLV to MP4 in our choice of container format.

Video quality’s awesome, and some samples available for a short while at:

1) Fantastic Four: http://marcellus.tv/f_four.html
2) Sharks: http://marcellus.tv/shark.html
3) Batman Begins: http://marcellus.tv/batmanbegins.html

Enjoy the videos and stay tuned for more exciting announcements coming up in a couple of weeks!

Exciting news from the Marcellus product team: two new features added this week.

First, we’ve added the ability for the scrubber to be hidden after a few seconds of inactivity(you can specify the number of seconds, of course).

Second, you can also specify the default volume for each player instance when the video loads up.

Screen shot below, and hope you enjoy these additions!

This is a super interview of Greg Jarobe (co-founder of SEO-PR) on ReelSEO.

He talks about the opportunity presented by an audience of over 105 million monthly unique visitors, and some of the mindset changes needed to capitalize on that opportunity.

Key take-aways:

1) Think of YouTube as an opportunity to promote, and pre-sell.

2) Provide enhanced content(high quality videos, lots of videos), and an optimal context(meta-data for search and discovery)

3) Engage with the YouTube community- don’t just sit there and wait for the hits to come.

Thanks to Mark (Robertson) at ReelSEO for conducting the interview.

We’ve recently had to break something of a sweat in figuring out how to track conversions using Google analytics, when the goal funnel involves sub-domains.

In case anyone else runs into similar problems, here’s what you do:

1) Add this line(in BOLD, below) to your Google Analytics code, on both the starting page(step 1) as well as the conversion page(step 2).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".example.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}
</script>

2. Then, if your start page(where visitors land) is: http://mydomain.com/start/index.php and your conversion page(where people land after signup or something like that) is: http://sub.mydomain.com/welcome/index.php, then you specify your funnel as:

Step 1: www.mydomain.com/start/index.php

Step 2: sub.mydomain.com/welcome/index.php

3.  That’s it. You’re done.

Some publishers need tool-tips for buttons on the player scrubber, and some don’t. So, we’ve added tool-tip support as a player customization feature in your publisher console.

Just click on a video, and on the player customization page that follows, you’ll find a checkbox to enable/disable tooltips. Simple.

Much love to Everett Teague @ Pro Web Communications for the gentle prod.

The Marcellus Video Platform (mvp v1.0) went live over the weekend.
You can now sign up for a trial account directly on the site(http://www.marcellus.tv) and try out the service yourself.

Here are a few screen shots:

1) Video listing: A listing of your entire video library, sortable by viewership, video title(alphabetical), and date.

2) Metadata editing: Easily add/change video metadata like title, keywords and description. Comes in handy when we start making your video content SEO-friendly.

3) Video player customization: Change the look and feel of your video player, including colors for individual player components. Add a custom watermark or logo as well.

4) Video uploads: Upload video files up to 1 GB in size, in most formats (WMV, MPG, AVI, MOV, MP4) for automatic encoding to Flash. Also, view real time information on your used storage vs. total storage capacity.

5) Reports: comprehensive reports on your content usage, video placement footprint(first publishing point only for now), storage and bandwidth usage, and more. All in one simple reports interface with date-based filtering.

Hello,

We’ve made a few changes to our player. The noticeable ones are:

1) Removed anti-aliasing of scrubber items: the play/pause buttons, and the time code display now show up in a crisper form, with no anti-aliasing.

2) Reduced height of scrubber area: the scrubber was originally about 45 pixels high, and we’ve brought that down to about 26 pixels.

3) Better border-fitting: now, the video flushes quite well with the edges of the player, something we were struggling with in the previous version of the player.

Hello,

In times like these, it’s hard to ignore comments like “There’s no money in online video”.

On the one hand, we don’t believe that to be true at all.
On the other hand, the ground-realities of today do lend some credibility to that comment.

This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the subject, aimed to stimulate thought for content publishers, as well as technology providers.

However, any discussion about “monetization” and “business models” in the online video space is going to be incomplete without a thorough understanding of online video consumption patterns(not statistics…but patterns).
Moreover, after Umair Haque’s brilliant pieces on connected consumption, the attention economy, micro-media, we haven’t really seen any thought-leaders try to turn these theories into real-world case studies.

Short of being thought-leaders, we’re going to take upon the responsibility of sharing some of our learnings on these areas with the readers of this blog.  You will find them categorized under “get into our minds“.

Topics we’re going to cover, in no particular order:

++ Understanding and leveraging context in the online video space
// Because no one but (x)ollywood can get away with “Content is king”

++ Lean-back(10-inch) vs. Lean-forward(10-foot) experiences
// Because if you’re thinking about the 9 feet 2 inches, you’re toast

++ Audience engagement
// Because there is no buttered popcorn to pass around..or is there?

++ Moving from Akamai to Amazon
// Because we found it a lot easier to commit to $0.10c/GB, than we did to $4,000/month

++ Elasticity, Distribution, and “The Cloud”
// Because when you have a “billion markets of ten”, there can’t be any rude awakenings

++ The dark horse that will win the day: SaaS
// Because when you have a “billion markets of ten”, only mass customization will keep you alive

++ The “interoperability” myth of web 2.0
// Because end user “mashups” aren’t a good enough substitute for horizontal integration amongst service providers

—————-

There’s probably going to be a whole lot more that comes up, and as always, we invite your suggestions/thoughts on everything that we write.

Thank you,

-preetam

I’d like to end our Obama-centric, and politically biased diatribes on the Marcellus blog, with this video.

Perhaps all of you have watched this already.

Nonetheless, it’s still very moving, so let’s end this election chatter and move on with a renewed sense of vigor and with the re-instated belief: Yes, We Can!

Cheers, from all of us here at Marcellus.

[youtube=http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY]