the Crow Digital Media Blog

There’s a little wizardry coming out of Pittsburgh these days that you should be aware of.

Not yet officially released but available in beta form for downloading (beta means it is still undergoing development and testing but they want you to try it out and provide feedback so that they can make it ready for its official launch) the Wizzard Media Player is attempting to provide something really intriguing to all of us generating online video content.

Some of the features include:

• Built for content that is released in episodes. Each new episode is automatically pulled into the player via an RSS feed
• Auto detects the viewers connection speed and gives them the video at at a playback rate calculated to provide the best possible viewing experience.
• It’s a Flash-based player that can play back video encoded in the highly popular MPEG 4 format known as H.264
• Can display ad content (in addition to your video) and send viewers to other Web sites for more information - so, yes, your online video CAN make you money someday
• Has some built-in view tracking and audience behavior analysis capabilities
• Your content can be easily distributed out to popular video sharing sites

All of this sounds really terrific, in fact I encourage you to scan their press release to get more information.

I haven’t had much hands-on experience with it besides doing a quick test with some of my own video and chatting with the development team (who are very responsive to user feedback which is always an excellent predictor of good things to come!) I even pitched them the idea of a “Wizzard Wizard” to help publishers enter in the correct setup parameters and it appears they liked that idea since they’ve already begun working on it. (I can’t say for sure that their decision was based on my feedback alone but I am sure it played a part!)

Tags: online video, video player, Wizzard

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 7:53 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.