WorldNow allows embeddable video… sorta
Don Day July 23rd, 2008
Several WorldNow sites I frequent have a neat new Flash-based video player. Kudos!
But I doubt the player is getting embedded a whole lot… the video plays on load. Not when you click play - but as soon as it loads. There’s actually been two occasions in the past month where I’ve wanted to embed a video on my other blog - but it’s a no go because I don’t want to BLAST audio on my users.
Ya’ win some…
22 Comments Add your own
1. Rob | July 23rd, 2008 at 9:11 pm
That’s a setting that can - and should - be adjusted by the website staff in the video player.
I found the same problem and it comes down to a box you can check to have it autostart “true” or “false.” True means it blares, false means it waits until you click on it to start.
(Hoping you don’t frequent my site because I think I have it set to not autoplay when you embed.)
2. Anonymous | July 23rd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
you know, it might be a good idea to actually provide links to some WorldNow sites with the new player.
3. Jay | July 24th, 2008 at 4:37 am
Here are a few:
wmctv.com
wave3.com
wtoc.com
wistv.com
lasvegasnow.com
4. Matt Sokoloff | July 24th, 2008 at 5:51 am
All Tribune publishing sites went to the new player months ago. The UI is not intuitive at all. You have to click on the mail icon and then click “grab” to get the embed code. (unless you are on the large video player) The embed code is also way too long.
Full Disclosure: I work for Orlando Sentinel owned by Tribune which has a contract with WorldNow to use them on our sites.
5. News4Matt | July 24th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Here’s an example of someone takeing the code and using it…
The video window is at the bottom of the article:
gothamist.com/2008/06/16/otb_saved_but_bloombergpaterson_fig.php
6. JT | July 24th, 2008 at 7:53 am
If the video plays on load, you can blame the station rather than WorldNow - as the play on load is an option and not standard on the video player.
7. Don Day | July 24th, 2008 at 9:22 am
No - I still blame WorldNow.
The DEFAULT setting shouldn’t be “play on load.” The default should be “play on click.”
8. Steve | July 24th, 2008 at 9:28 am
From the WorldNow standpoint - why turn off auto play?
Leaving it on will show in the metrics that many more people are watching videos…even if it’s not reality.
9. Don Day | July 24th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
But it will greatly depress the number of initial embeds.
There’s a reason YouTube and virtually every other site in the world don’t do it that way.
I would NEVER put an autoplay video on my site - and most other folks won’t as well.
10. Gorman | July 24th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Steve: That pretty much underscores how WorldNow has (I’ll argue unintentionally) undercut the user experience for nearly 10 years.
Slow-loading, awkwardly-blocked, cookie cutter sites forced on both remedial and advanced operations alike. If you wanted anything remotely user-friendly (at least in my experience), you had to just make a big iframe and drop the page in there, because you have no access to style sheets or scripts.
And now it appears they’re screwing up advancements in the one thing they could plant their flag on, their video solution. If boosting streaming numbers really is the reason why they’re ignoring this widely practiced way of embedding videos, then it’s asinine and they need to fix it ASAP. Actually, whatever the reason, fix it ASAP.
11. tdc | July 24th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
don’t you guys believe in the concept of “built to fail” so as to protect the mothership?
i’m not sure about the dollar short thing, but they haven’t even got around to updating worldnow.com with what seems to be a great piece of news.
adding over 100 clients at the exact time your “competitor” (according to b&c) is looking at their major market clients’ keester seems noteworthy.
very.
12. Amanda E. | July 24th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
@Gorman
Worldnow can be beaten into submission and widgets added that don’t involve a big ugly iframe that users can’t link directly to the content.
Click my name for an example done in javascript, look at the URL as you click through the galleries.
[disclosure - I was the author of this widget]
The play-on-page landing is not cool at all. Its a great way to drive away the lunch-hour and at work crowds who browse your site to kill time.
13. tdc | July 24th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
#12,
did i ever tell you i love geeky women?
14. Anonymous | July 24th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Autoplay is awful. The bump in stats that it provides is only short-term, as people will now be less inclined to come to the page in the future.
I also HATE low quality audio. I can tolerate blockiness in video, but that tinney sound that they are putting with the video grates on me. Come on, people — just crank up the audio quality by another 16-32 kbps. It’s not going to kill you.
Another annoyance: why is nobody doing widescreen? I would think that, given the buzz around HDTV, stations would want to have 16:9 video. It would provide a more progressive feel, in my opinion.
Finally, whenever I see video on a TV site, I always wonder what the numbers are. How many video clips are viewed every day? What percentage of people going to a story watch the associated video? It’s hard to get a benchmark sometimes of how you’re doing relative to other similar stations.
15. Steve | July 24th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
@ #14
As soon as WorldNow comes up with an HD encoder, you’ll see more HD videos.
We’ve been waiting….
16. Gorman | July 24th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
@Amanda,
Apologies, I was a little too specific. I was referring to trying to lay out the homepage into something a little less, er, Worldnow-like. In another life I did a little submission-beating of my own.
The point I was trying to make is that if I have a piece of code or stylesheet that doesn’t break the site and if it would normally go in head tags, then I shouldn’t have to anything in an iframe just to make a widget like your gallery (which I like, btw) work. And the way I tried to apply it to the topic at hand is that I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they made it hard to do go with a better option.
But I’m derailing. Again, my apologies. Down with Autoplay.
17. drb | July 24th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
KSL-TV does widescreen video. Of course, we rolled our own — we didn’t wait for a video provider to do it for us.
18. Gorman | July 24th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Even though it’s Thursday, can I blame a long week for not adding the words “put” and “to” in their proper spaces?
19. JT | July 24th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
@15
WTVF-TV does 16:9 video in both our old WorldNow video player AND the new widget. The video is pulled from our HD signal.
20. JT | July 24th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
I gave the wrong link to our video player for the full 16:9 effect.
21. Rob | July 25th, 2008 at 8:38 am
@Gorman: See my post at the top of the comments. The video player autoplay feature can be turned on and off by the web staff at the individual site.
Just to be clear, WorldNow does offer that on/off capability for autoplay.
(I’m not a WorldNow employee. Just wanted to set that straight. And I agree with your point of view.)
22. Drew | August 13th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Click on my name to see, wait for it…
16×9 AND no Auto-Play!
Imagine that!
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