Daily Motion Customizes Video Players But Not Enough
Daily Motion, Metacafe or any major video social networking sites that are still in the ring with YouTube in one way or another could increase their market share by offering truly great customization of video players. Not just colors, and thumbnails, although that’s not bad for a start.
What Daily Motion offered as customizing your video player was found too trivial by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb. “This headline excited me, but this looks like pretty paltry customization options. If DM offered more it could be a real leader in this feature,” wrote Marshall and then did not check back to answer the question of “What kind of new options would you like ?”
What is this Daily Motion?
If you have not heard from Daily Motion it might be because you are satisfied with YouTube. However, Daily Motion is very strong in an unceasing video segment: French films, video clips, user generated content on its video social networking site. Occasionally non-French content may overcome YouTube. For instance, I first heard about I Legend on Daily Motion (needless to say, in French, but there is not much speaking going on in the film anyway). Here’s the American version of Daily Motion.
And there are many more language versions, which is also great.
Language options in video sites
In YouTube I simply hit a Hungarian term if I want to find Hungarian content, but some words may formally overlap with non-Hungarian versions and that messes up video search results. If you think language issue is not a big deal, you don’t know Europeans. Most European young guys and gals speak English, middle aged people (especially in the Eastern-European part) speak less. So getting your content in your own language is a huge deal. Another example: Hungary has about 10 million people out of which 2-3 million use the internet regularly. Can you guess how many Hungarian video social networking sites this little country has? I guess you can’t. There are about 8 video social sites targeting about 3-6 million users, finding their own places in the video market.
But back to Daily Motion, and I should go further than Europe, it is also available in Turkish, Korean, Japanese, etc.
Now their March addition is that you can customize the color and logo options of your Daily Motion player. But it shouldn’t be the ultimate goal of customization. You can set the following (if you can handle a bit of html you could change it earlier and can customize it in other players too):
- player size in 3 versions
- autoplay or not
- the color of the toolbar, buttons and text (youtube only lets choosing some color pairs)
- offer related vids or not
Wishlist, random ideas:
- thumbnails - many visitors are attracted or turned off the thumbnails, so obviously it is a great deal to be able to set your thumbnail in 3 seconds
- interactivity (why not make an agreement with an interactive video company to improve services and make a totally great video site?)
- create own video station by selecting keywords. Video station will automatically and without a break play videos based on the keywords (positive and negative matches, phrase matches options, etc.)
- be able to filter content for the above video station based on user names, views, ratings, comments, etc.
- own video station, like pandora or last.fm channels will learn what I like and dislike and offer new videos if this option is chosen (no, it is not exactly stumble upon and not youtube automatic playlist either) and connect me with like-minded users. :)
- you can customize what video ad types you accept, their length, frequency, your preferred payment, etc.
- can add your video message or video avatar to any selected videos (pre or post) with a click, without actually having to edit and merge them
- etc. etc.
But you know what? In the end I go anywhere where I found what I am looking for. And that stills weighs more for me than a customized video player. Yes, they are two different issues.