Hulu Launches Private Beta, Surprisingly Little Excitement Ensues

Here at Searchles HQ, we just received our invitation to check out newfangled video site, Hulu.com – a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. to host premium online video content from their popular TV shows and feature films. All the good content (read: Scrubs and The Office episodes…woo hoo) is indeed ready and available with tolerable pre-roll ad action, and Hulu does allow embeds and a primitive clipping functionality to customize your video sharing.

Otherwise? Nothing innovative, nothing earth-shattering, nothing user-generated – if I wanted broadcast television, I’d be working my Tivo. NBC and News Corp. have managed to create a platform for distribution of their TV shows online but they haven’t gone beyond that to create any sense of community or user involvement that will compete with YouTube. If a connected community of users isn’t what they’re after, why go through the trouble to create the destination site Hulu.com? Why not rely on partners like AOL and MSN to be channels for your content? That way, with minimal effort, they could still maintain the control over advertising that the Hulu platform offers.

On Hulu there’s really nothing to do aside from watch TV (kinda like your hometown right before you left for college). There’s a comment feature below a particular clip or episode, but where are the forums, discussion groups, pages where I can actually chat Weekend at Bernie’s with fellow fans and really connect to other viewers? Hulu users do have a “profile”, a playlist, and are able to view video history, but there are really too many barriers to interactivity to make Hulu a playground for former network TV viewers. Don’t get me wrong - the content is great, and the video quality is top notch compared to YouTube, but Hulu is going to have to take a turn towards focusing on the users in order to be any sort of competition for the other well-established video sites.

And because they do support embeds and we'd like to show Hulu at least a little love. Here's an SNL classic:

The Evolution of Searchles TV Remash – Steve Mann Tells it Like it is

Title: The Evolution of Searchles TV Remash – Steve Mann Tells it Like it is

At the end of October we launched Searchles TV Remash – an online video editing tool that lets you extract clips from ANY YouTube video and mash the edited videos up into one embeddable player. We thought we’d reach out to some industry experts in the field of optimizing the user-experience with our new feature so we contacted Steve Mann - leader of the Total Customer Experience, Competitive Marketing and Services Marketing functions for SAP.

Steve came back to us with some insightful feedback regarding the Remash user-experience. Below Steve outlines his main points from the assessment he posted on his blog – AbleBrains - and Dumbfounder’s response to each, just to get a bit of perspective as to what changes we’ll potentially be making to the Remash editor going forward and the general reasoning behind certain parts of the Searchles process.
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Steve Mann -- The experience is basic, simple and clean which I like but there is so much more to that can be added to the experience to enrich it without complicating it. To name a few -- Registration: a simple 3 step registration process that eventually let me down because the email confirmation to allow me to actually use the site took too long by my count - 45 minutes

Dumbfounder -- This is an ongoing problem we have. 97% of the time email goes through but there are a few cases where email gets delayed or doesn't get there. We think some bigger companies have us labeled as spammers, but it is a tough problem to work through. In short, we hate email authentication, but it is necessary.

Steve Mann -- As part of the registration process one is asked to add a Searchles Bookmarklet extension - which was a completely manual process and there was no overt opportunity to OPT OUT. I just wanted to get to the Remash editor. That's a poor experiential piece that I'd recommend fixing immediately. By the way, I'd add Flock as one of the browser options.

Dumbfounder -- We want people to install the bookmarklet, can you tell? It isn't required, but we really really really want you to contribute to Searchles. Glossing over this means you miss the point of Searchles.

Steve Mann -- What you see in the screen shot above is the Remash editor which allows you to search for youtube videos, select the ones you are interested in and then clip each individual video as well as sequence them. You can then name them, tag them and share them. BUT and this is a big but, the videos wouldn’t load for me to allow me to see them as part of the editing process until I saved the mashup, viewed it and then I had to move back into the editor to actually see the mashup... so I'd have to say there was some sort of glitch, something was funky and in that regard, Performance SUCKED.

Dumbfounder -- Youtube made a change today with how you access their flv's. It is now fixed.

Steve Mann -- Trial edit function was completely missing. A way to preview just the section of the mashup you are editing would nice... to preview your edits before you commit to them. Further that should be an option to preview, not a prerequisite.

Dumbfounder -- We are working on this. Hopefully soon...

Steve Mann -- Give the user feedback on Total Mashup time! As I clipped the individual videos, I kept looking for feedback on total mashup length change the selected clip properties. Why don’t I see it being reflected in the total time line of the video mashup I am creating? Speaking of feedback, nice work on the ratings, but you might want to extend to full-fledged reputation management so that top mashup artists are recognized and sought after - thereby bringing more intrinsic value to your users and hence more traffic to the site.

Dumbfounder -- The total edit time and bars to reflect the true length of each edit were honestly corners we cut to get the product out the door. They should be in there soon.

Steve Mann -- Effects - I wanted to build in transition effects between the elements in my mashup to make the mashup cooler. They should also support building "Starting Scenes" for a mashup to either introduce it or again to enhance the entertainment experience.

Dumbfounder -- We want to keep this product as simple as possible to make it accessible to everyone. If we see the users demanding this feature then we will reconsider.

Steve Mann -- Video Segments - I really like the fact that when I want to skip to a particular segment in a movie on my iPod, it displays scene segments. I suggest some sort of algorithm that can do the same with these videos so you can jump to specific sections of the video.

Dumbfounder -- Wow, this is a tough problem - one to think about.

Steve Mann -- No cropping. If I want the beginning and ending of a video and I want to crop out the middle, can I do that? Not really I can shorten from the beginning or end but not take out the middle…so a cropping function is necessary.

Dumbfounder -- We struggled with this one. You CAN do this by dragging in multiple copies of the same video, but it is a bit buggy right now, and needs refinement to make it easy and intuitive.

Steve Mann -- Delete function -- when I saved and then deleted on component of my mashup the video wasn't deleted. I had to go into edit mode and delete it from there.

Dumbfounder -- This is a bug we just fixed today.

Steve Mann -- Its still a bit buggy... for instance I tried sliding the clip bar back to a point in the video that had already been played to see if the editor would stop and revert to that point but it doesn’t and it should.

Dumbfounder -- Indeed, Flash is finicky how it deals with video and random seeks. We continue to try to find workarounds to make it a smooth process.

Steve Mann -- On re-edit, of a mashup, the system didn't remember the re-ordering I had done from Play mode and I had to perform that edit again.

Dumbfounder -- Not able to reproduce this problem, it seems to work ok for us. Let me know if it is consistent for you. I don't suppose there was anything you liked about Remash? :) Maybe the concept? The potential? Our pretty Flash interface? My sparkling personality? Was the process intuitive enough for you? I hope we didn't ruin your day by making you angry.

Steve Mann – Re: Liking it? You wanted brutally honest. Its good, its fun, it needs work.

Steve, we absolutely appreciate the feedback. As for the rest of you out there – send us feedback as well! What has your experience been with Remash thus far? How can we make it better for YOU? Are you dazzled by Dumbfounder’s sparkling personality? We appreciate any and all constructive comments.

Searchles in the Washington Post: "If You Build It, They Will Come", says the Caveman

If you happened to be reading the Business section in yesterday's Washington Post, you would've caught an interesting article regarding the social networking and social media companies popping up in and around our nation's capitol. Silicon Valley is just shaking in its boots (or perhaps that was an earthquake...tough to say).

Washington Post Staff Writer, Zachary Goldfarb writes, "a modest community of about a dozen such companies, with names like Mixx, Searchles and Qloud, has emerged in the region in recent months. These start-ups hope to build on the success of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and other interactive media sites by creating applications that piggyback on -- or replicate -- the goliaths."

Mr. Goldfarb, we're certainly happy we caught your eye!!...and we love piggyback rides, but we're certainly not trying to replicate google. We just feel our social search model has the potential to weed out the irrelevant content and point the interesting content in your direction a bit more efficiently. In addition, social networking features integrated into our social search offers the ability to easily find and connect to fellow users who share your interests. While we're Washingtonians at heart, we're also excited to have an international base of users to be able to offer various cultural perspectives on current events! (did we mention our Alexa ranking was once down to #516 in Moldova?)

So have a look at the article in the post! Also check out this sweet Searchles video made by one of our users below!