theChickenTest : Bryce Johnson

Many of you that know me are probably wondering why I didn’t sooner and to those people I say… “Shut Up, I’m not that far gone” ;-)

Ever since I started this blog I have always had a love hate relationship with YouTube and other video distribution methods. YouTube video sucks but the exposure is great. I’m not dedecated enough to encode every format under the sun and host them like the fine folks at CommandN. Also I believe that people don’t care if they can download my video, I wouldn’t. I’ve tried Revver because I thought the video quality was better but honestly they take too long to put up a video, their review process is annoying. Revver’s video time limit or lack-there-of is great though. Facebook video is good quality and has an interesting distribution mechanisim. I wish i could see # of views in Facebook but the fact that I can’t post the video outside of FB doesn’t really matter to me. To my detriment I also don’t care about iTunes (yes that is my bias showing, I should be able to hate sucess/monopolies as well).

I will probably still use YouTube, Revver and Facebook in the future but for placing video on this site, I’m going to use Silverlight.

The Silverlight Streaming service allows me to host 4gigs of video for free and I have control of the encoder which is what I have always wanted. They say the video time limit is 10 minutes but it is actually 22megs, so if I have a video that is only 2 minutes long I can offer it up in HD resolution practically. Right now I am using a minimal player skin while I think about my new site design but this player can be customized to whatever I want (when I get around to it).

I hope that the missing plugin experience gets improved that lame little banner is not good enough :-)