LiveRail for Video Publishers

LiveRail is a unique online video distribution and ad-platform that aims to give power back to aspiring video publishers like us.

As an online video publisher, you face two key challenges. The first is how to monetize your content; the second is how to distribute it without signing away your copyrights or spending a fortune on bandwidth.

LiveRail takes a new approach to solve both these problems. By publishing your content through them, your video is streamed back exclusively to your own website, covering all your bandwidth costs, along with highly targeted, relevant and unobtrusive advertising, that your viewers only need to watch when it interests them.

We've applied as a publisher, to determine how it compares to a similar offering from AdBrite. They are our current video ad provider. This is what "You Know How To Love," a song video produced by me looks like and how it works in their Flash player:





Sloowwwwwwwww!!!

Versus the same ad on LiveRail:





... doesn't show at all in this Blogger page, even after tweaking the embed code three different ways. Works in our WordPad edition, though!

Cybercast credit: iTV 21

You Know How To Love ...

Yes. I do. Take my wife's song video for it:





Wow. Wow. And wow. I'm truly and deeply touched. How many of you have had your wife or girlfriend write a song and perform it too for you? However, this is not a session in personal cult building or waxing eloquent. Rather, I'm trying out this song video with Adbrite's new video player.

Adbrite calls itself the Internet's ad marketplace. Their new AdFlicks video service allows you to make money (monetize, in Internet marketin parlance) with your videos. How are they different from Google's video ads? Let's see the features:

* Fully customizable video player, easy-to-use, and 100% free - TRUE
* Brand your videos with your own custom logo "watermark" - ALTHOUGH HARD TO SEE, OUR iTV21 LOGO IS DISPLAYED
* "Split-screen" ads engage users without interrupting viewing experience - DON'T KNOW ABOUT THAT...
* Sharing features promote your site when your videos get "viral" - WILL SEE ABOUT THAT...
* Earn money from your videos, even when they're embedded into other peoples' Web sites - DITTO

While this is all well and good, you must have your video in Flash FLV format and host it on your own. Just the video. No player. So you can't use your favorite video sharing site. Most people don't know how to convert video into Flash format and don't care. Why would they, when YouTube and most everybody else does it for them? Seems to me a big disadvantage vs. Google. We'll see.

I'll report back on the real stuff (read earnings) and Google's offering too.

Broadcast credit: iTV21