Every week for the next few weeks we are featuring the web series “Missed Connections Live” by Melissa Center on our video sharing site. Below is episode 1 of the series, and you can stay updated on all the new episodes (they keep getting better and better) by subscribing to them in your favorite RSS reader.

Missed Connections Live Episode 1 from Melissa on UnleashVideo

A couple of weeks ago we relaunched our video sharing site but instead of writing a post about it, we wrote tweets, and shared the news on Facebook with our fans. The design is cleaner, navigation is easier, and videos start playing and streaming quicker which is important for an improved viewing experience.

You might notice that UnleashVideo no longer accepts video uploads, and user accounts no longer exist. The focus is now solely on video viewing, sharing, rating, and engagement.

All new video content for the site going forward will come from Spidvid’s video production community. Everything has been customized to accommodate the team produced content from Spidvid.

How all future video pages will be:

• Collaborative production teams – All other video sharing sites acknowledge the video creator by displaying “By: creator name” on their video pages. What we do is not only display the creator but each team member who helped produce the video as well, which showcases their Spidvid profile picture and link.
• Google Maps – Each team member is displayed on a Google map with the rest of their team members. Doing this outlines the concept of empowering anyone from around the world to form production teams who then create and produce videos together. This shows not only who the members are, but where they are located as well.
• Facebook - Facebook Connect has been integrated so that anyone can post a comment on a video (when logged into their Facebook account), and then share that comment and video link with their friends on the world’s #1 social network. Disqus has also been integrated to allow anyone to post a comment as a guest or via their Disqus account.

Be sure to stay updated on all of Spidvid’s community produced videos by subscribing to our RSS feed.

It would be nice to fill this blog full of remarkable content every day of the year, especially now that we have given everything a complete makeover here.

Over the next couple of weeks there are plans to reduce the amount of features and functionality so that pages load faster and the site interface is easier to use.

New video content is our focus going forward and we are unleashing the 4th season of our sponsored web series Assisted Living over the next few days. We’re also very excited about the future video content coming from Spidvid’s community in the coming months.

Thanks to everyone for viewing and engaging with the videos on our site, your community involvement is very much appreciated.

+   

So as far as we know UnleashVideo.com was the first video sharing website to allow more than 1 person to be part of video project. We have allowed this since we launched last year in May 2008 where any video creator could work with any editor, and then automatically give credit to the editor for the work they did on the video.

Our parent company Socially Collaborative Media Inc. has just recently released Spidvid, a site focused on connecting individuals together within the video production industry. Through these connections, collaborative teams can be formed to collectively produce quality video content. See these 2 visual models which will help you to better understand how this model works.

Since Spidvid is very new and in private beta, the first compatible video sharing site is our very own UnleashVideo.com. There are plans to broaden the distribution ecosystem but for now UnleashVideo is the destination to view, share, and engage with the content derived from Spidvid’s creation and production community.

We don’t expect any videos to be available until later this month or possbily not until next month, but certainly look forward to the creative new content soon. To keep yourself nicely updated on all new content, easily subscribe to our RSS feed.

So our video sharing site has been down for the last few days now as we fully recover from the aweful hacking our servers took a couple weeks ago. Not all features and functionality are working 100% but we’re working hard to get back there as soon as possible. 

Season 3 of Assisted Living will be released (we hope) this Wednesday. To make up for the pushed back release date we will be featuring the first 3 episodes of the season to catch up on our initially forecasted schedule. 

We will build UnleashVideo.com back up stronger than ever, and thank all of the individuals who helped us through this difficult time.

It’s never fun reporting bad things, but our servers have been hacked and we need to spend time restoring them back to normal, and increasing their security going forward. This is the first time we’ve had to deal with issues like these, and we will do everything possible to ensure that events of this nature don’t happen again.

On the positive side of it all, it’s flattering that someone out there wanted to take us down, so we must be doing something right. 

We planned on releasing Assisted Living Season 3 last week, but some functionality including video uploads have been affected. We hope to release last week’s episode, along with this week’s episode together either on Easter Friday or Easter Monday. 

Thanks to everyone for their patience, especially to the creators who wanted to unleash a video for us to review. 

Stay tuned into our blog, or follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/unleashvideo) for further updates.