In retrospect, we saw huge moves last year in the video space. In September of 2011, comScore reported that 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content for an average of 19.5 hours per viewer (1). The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in 39.8 billion video views and the online video platform market as a whole increased by 40% year on year. Numbers like these are pretty jaw dropping and it’s plain to see that now more than ever both consumers and companies are hugely engaging with online video (2).

Looking forwards to 2012, we thought we’d pull together a few predictions for things that we think will be big:

1. Mobile and iPad video explosion - With over 1.08 billion 3G enabled mobile phones in the market today and climbing, we believe we’ll see a massive increase in the number of users who are consuming video content on their iPads, iPods, iPhones and Android devices (3,4). We will also see an increase in the amount of traffic on mobile devices that are driven from search engines to site content. More than 70% of the world’s population now has a mobile phone and as these users switch from standard phones to smartphones engagement with video will skyrocket (5).
2. Web TV re-imagined - We believe we’ll see some big moves by Google TV and Apple TV this year, which will start pulling the web into the living room in a much more integrated way than in the past. For content distributors it will be important to adopt a multi-platform strategy that includes distribution to web-enabled IPTV devices. We also think it’s pretty likely that Apple will release a TV that integrates a set-top-box, display and remote all into one simple package that will redefine how people interact with televisions in their homes.
3. Demand for multi-platform publishing will grow – When content is pushed to the internet, publishers will want their assets to be accessible and browse-able on a large number of devices and platforms covering YouTube, Vimeo, web TV devices, mobile devices, tablet devices and of course, desktop and mobile browsers, which will lead to an increase in demand for fully integrated solutions.
4. HTML5 first strategy will emerge – Due to the above point, the need for video to be served via HTML5 players capable of playback on a large range of devices will force Flash to be used only in the absence of HTML5. Organizations will increasingly prefer to have their videos play in HTML5 players and companies with an HTML5-first policy will become bigger players in markets where previously their Flash-based opponents triumphed.
5. Video in higher education will skyrocket – With the announcement of projects like Apple iBooks and the continued evolution of iTunes U and YouTube for Education, we think this will be a big year for the educational market as more video content than ever will hit students surfing on a plethora of devices. Online video will start revolutionizing education as it will allow students to learn from anywhere and more importantly, at their own pace. Tools that allow universities to easily take content from classrooms, manage and distribute that content to multiple platforms will become increasingly important.

We’ve got some big announcements coming in the next two months and some terrific new features that we think will place MediaCore in a strong position to help customers really grow their audiences, customers and strategies over the course of this year. Here’s to big things!

What do you think will happen in 2012?

We think this is a wonderful way to end a great year and we’d like to wish everyone a great holiday season and a happy new year!

-The MediaCore Team

Currently the API allows developers to create media items, upload multiple files, add metadata (such as titles, descriptions and categories) and never have to worry about the details of encoding.

For more information please see our new documentation on this here:
http://mediacore.com/docs/upload_api.html

To provide an example of how to upload video or audio to MediaCore via the API we’ve created a simple uploader written in Python that can be run on any Mac, Linux or Windows computer that has Python installed.

You can download this uploader and give it a try yourself here:
http://mediacore.com/docs/mcoreuploader.html

Here’s a brief overview of each new feature and what it does. You can find these options now under your ‘Site Settings’ via the administrative menu.

1. Security – Provides the ability to define roles and permissions for users. Here you can edit and change what users who are not logged in can view, what people who have logged in can view, or define your own roles and permissions to match your organizations needs. By default we have included roles for the general public, registered users, administrators and managers. Roles can be assigned to individual users via the ‘Users’ menu option.
2. Users –  Provides the ability to email invite users to your site. You can invite a new user, customize their invitation message, and choose what role they will have, and which group they belong to.
3. Groups - Using groups it’s possible to create levels of access within your site to specific content. A group can contain an unlimited number of users, and is used to limit who can view your content.
4. Who can see this video - When you add media you will now see an option for ‘Who can see this video’ where you can choose either public access, registered users only, or choose a custom group. If you choose a custom group, access is restricted only to users who log in and are members of that group.

To see a video of all of these great new features in action, have a gander below:

Here’s the big list of all the things we’ve tweaked and improved in this release:

• Improved performance throughout the administrative panel. Load times should now have a nice 10-20% reduction as we’ve cleaned up javascript and consolidated a number of things within our code.
• Improved and unified the look and feel throughout the entire administrative panel. All screens are now much more consistent and we’ve simplified a lot of the language to make things intuitive. The Site Settings interface has been hugely improved in this regard. Other screens that have been hugely improved include the library, podcasts, and comments.
• Improved help throughout the app. On almost every major screen throughout the application we have written support documentation to explain what the various features on the page are an how they work.
• Added site security, users and groups to the Site Settings interface. It’s now possible to completely control who has access to content within your site.
• Added autocomplete to tags to make it possible to add tags without having to remember which tags you’ve added in the past
• Added multi-format video downloads for users by allowing them to click the “download” button and choose from a variety of file formats including the original file download.
• Added iTunes U support to podcasts so that Universities and Colleges can easily get their content into iTunes U. See our post on iTunes U support.

Probably one of the most noticeable changes in this release is the newly revamped “Add Media” interface which builds upon past improvements letting you upload your media faster with less confusion. We’ve taken the new unified window approach across the entire app and consolidated many of the various interfaces into single window menus.

We’re rolling out these new feature to all users immediately, so get out there, try em’ out and let us know what you think!

Starting today MediaCore will be the first online media platform to make it possible for colleges and universities to create podcasts for distribution within iTunes U. Currently many universities are using iTunes U, but there are no intuitive online tools for publishing directly to iTunes, and that’s something we’re going to change. We’ve been working hard on a streamlined publishing process for managing a single podcast or multiple podcasts and we’re pleased to now be announcing it’s availability to all customers.

If you’re into podcasting you can use MediaCore to create a podcast, upload episodes, automatically generate all RSS feeds, and deliver your video or audio content via our insanely fast global content delivery network.

If you already have a MediaCore account and you’re wondering how to create a podcast for distribution specifically for iTunes U, here’s the detailed how-to:

1.  Login to the administration panel, and choose the podcast tab
2. Next, hit the create a podcast button at the top left of the screen
3. Fill in the details about your podcast, and then proceed to add the relevant iTunes U category (ex. Biology)
4. Hit publish and you’re done! We’ll automatically generate all the iTunes U RSS for each podcast you create.

Once you have created a podcast, the next step is to add an episode to the podcast. To do this, click the “Add Episode” to the left of the newly listed podcast.

Below details how to add a podcast episode to your iTunes U podcast.

Optionally, you can choose to assign a particular episode to the same iTunes U category as the podcast, or alternatively choose another iTunes U category by clicking “iTunes U” under “Advanced” and selecting a new category for the particular podcast episode. You will be able to select any one of the standard iTunes U categories from this drop-down menu.

Lastly, we’ve made MediaCore work with both public and private feeds within iTunes U making it possible to distribute content via a university’s public or private iTunes U account.

Sprinkle Lab is a commercial filmmaking studio in San Francisco and they’re using MediaCore to present their own video site highlighting some terrific interviews with great minds like Eric Ries (Founder, The Lean Startup), Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist), Steve Blank (Serial Entrepreneur), and MG Siegler (Editor, TechCrunch).

Here’s a few words from them on this new series:

“It’s called Now I Know, and we’re really proud of it. We got to sit down with some incredible minds in the tech industry and talk to them about their experiences, failures and lessons learned. We’ve already interviewed some great people, but this is just the beginning!”

— Cameron Woodward, Co-Founder

Check it out: http://nowiknow.sprinklelab.com

Having had the opportunity to watch a few of these compelling videos in our office we’ve quickly become great fans of their work and what they are doing to help the startup community. If you like bite sized pieces of inspiration this is the place to go.

This week MediaCore was featured on the Sencha Touch Application Showcase. We use Sencha Touch to power our entire mobile experience, so it was a huge honour to see that they’ve listed us as one of their highlight mobile applications.

We’ve been really impressed with the power of Sencha and our development team has some tremendous things coming in the next few weeks that will be released in our mobile platform. With the release of Sencha 2.0 we anticipate being able to substantially increase the performance of our mobile app, reducing load times and making the app even more snappy. One of the biggest areas of improvement from Sencha 1.1 (which we are on now) to Sencha 2.0 is that load times for the application will substantially decrease. The graph below shows performance of Sencha 1.1 vs that of Sencha 2.0 (in blue).

Speed is paramount on mobile devices and we’re really looking forward to bringing these improvements to the MediaCore mobile experience.

Today we’re announcing support for UGC (user generated content). If you are running a MediaCore site and have enabled user uploads, you will now notice that users can now upload video or audio files located on their own computers. This is a great feature for allowing your users to contribute to your site’s content, adding to the interactivity of your MediaCore powered site.

Once a video file is uploaded the administrator of the site is notified, and can approve or delete the content. This provides administrators to carefully curate content before it is publicly visible.

Users can upload files up to 5GB in size, and will be given a sleek progress display while their video uploads.

If you have any questions or suggestions about this new addition please contact support@mediacore.com and we’ll be happy to help you.

We’ve just introduced secure progressive streaming links to all uploaded content, making your files safer than ever before.

What’s new with these links, you say? We’ve added some new tools that automatically generate unique URLs  for every visitor who comes to watch video on your site. This prevents users scraping your video and hot-linking directly to your file(s). The addition of this feature will reduce bandwidth costs while increasing the overall security of your video content. We take security seriously, and over the course of the next month we’re going to be adding even more controls to provide administrators with more tools to restrict who can access video or audio content.

If you have any questions about secure links or any other features please let us know.

If don’t already have a MediaCore account, sign up now to see it in action.