Instant Video Web Pages

It’s now so easy to add a Facebook “Like” button to your video pages, or even Facebook Comments.

Take a look at this quick video:

Adding Facebook Plugins to Your Video Page

Basically, all you do is add this where you want the Facebook Like button to show up:

[fblike]

Or add this where you want comments to show up:

[fbcomments]

Just type those in with whatever body copy you’re putting in on a page, etc. You don’t have to switch to “source mode” or anything like that.

I’ll have a tutorial video ready soon, but that preview video is probably enough to get you going. Give it a shot!

Many people who do a lot of video have their own Amazon S3 account — it’s cheap storage combined with cheap bandwidth, and is one of the reasons IVWP relies on it.

But if you have your own S3 account, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to use all the features of IVWP with your OWN S3 account?

Yep, and that’s why we added Personal S3, the ability to specify your own S3 account. After setting it up your videos will be uploaded to your own S3 bucket but you can still choose them from the dropdown list when creating a new video web page.

Best of all, you don’t have to worry about going over the storage and bandwidth limits of IVWP, because when you use your own S3 account you’re taking care of that!

Tutorial videos showing how to set up Personal S3 are coming, but if you’re not shy, click the Settings tab in your account and you can probably figure it out yourself!

Just introduced a new feature in IVWP over the weekend — splash images.

That’s the static picture that shows in the movie viewer before the user presses Play and can make your video look much more professional (instead of just showing the black square).

To use it, enter the URL of a picture in the new Splash Image field when creating (or editing) a video web page. If you don’t have your picture uploaded anywhere, you can use the Image Library button at the end of the field to upload a picture from your computer to the system.

A video tutorial showing how to use it will show up in the near future, but it’s pretty easy, so give it a shot!

There’s a new template available in Instant Video Web Pages:

Bravo Dk Lime – Video Size: 480×360 – Areas: Headline, Subhead, Optin, Body

A light version of that template (Bravo Lt Lime) will show up in a few days.

A new feature was rolled out today — the first of the statistics and reporting that will be made available. The video plays have been tracked, but you haven’t been able to get access to that data until today.

Here’s a quick video showing how it works:

This is available for Bronze, Silver, and Gold members.

When you go to create or edit a video web page you’ll find two additions:

1. Page Title – Now you can specify a title for the browser window. It will default to use whatever you put in the Name field, but you can change that if you like. This is useful mostly for those people who use the direct link to the video web page.

2. Copyright – Down at the bottom of the edit page there’s now a field for the copyright info you want at the bottom of the templates. This allows you to have a different copyright notice for each video web page you put up. If you don’t want different copyright notices, just ignore that field and leave it as the default.

Those with sharp eyes (well, really, those who just look at it) will see that the default copyright line as some weirdness to it:

[ivwp-copyrightyear]

[ivwp-copyrightname]

If you use those “tokens” in the copyright line they will be changed when the page is published to show the current year and the name you have specified in Settings, respectively.

You don’t have to use those, you can just specify 2010 for the year if you want — just remember to come back when it’s 2011 and change it. If you use the token, that change will happen automatically. (I love working lazy!)

I tweaked IVWP a little bit ago to simplify the URL:

OLD: http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/?m=23

NEW: http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/23

Plus, if you use the Call Name option you can use that on the end of the URL:

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/ivwp

Finally, if you want to disguise the link to make it look like a page, you can add any suffix onto the end:

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/ivwp.html

So, to recap the myriad options…

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/?m=23

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/23

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/ivwp

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/23.php

http://instantvideowebpages.com/play/ivwp.html

…all lead to the same place.

(Note: The Call Name field requires something unique, so if you try to use ivwp, for example, a message will tell you it’s already in use. A Call Name must be lowercase letters only.)

Five new templates were added to the site yesterday.

• Ionic Bald Eagle
• Ionic Mt. McKinley
• Ionic Sandy Beach
• Swirls Dark Blue
• Swirls Red

The Ionic templates do not have a built-in opt-in section, although you can put opt-in code in the body section if you like.

The Swirls templates have an opt-in section to the right of the video.

My plan is to add at least one new template per week to the site until there are at least a couple dozen (there are 16 right now).

Plus, I’m working on a “template library” that will give you dozens of options and even allow you to upload your own templates that will be available to YOU only.