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.

When UnleashVideo was launched last summer (of 2008) the idea was to provide a quality only video sharing network which would compete with the likes of YouTube, Metacafe, Revver, and others. With the video sharing space so competitive now in the form of thousands of sites there is no reason to compete directly against these players anymore.

Our strategy has shifted from allowing only pre-approved creators to upload video content, to only accepting uploads from collaborative production teams on Spidvid. So if you want to unleash videos on our site visit Spidvid and join their video production community.

Future video pages will feature content from Spidvid, have Facebook connect integration for comments, increased social features, and have Google Maps showing where each of the team members is based out of. These maps will show the global structure of the collaborative production teams, and outline that videos really can be created with members located all over the world.

The whole site is having a makeover to make each page more simple to navigate and use, and with less unnecessary features and images to display it will allow pages to load quicker, and videos to play faster which has been a past concern among viewers.

We expect this roll out to happen later next month just in time for Christmas. Thanks to everyone who has supported UnleashVideo 1.0 over the last year and a half, and we look forward to your engagement on our new and improved UnleashVideo 2.0 very soon.

We have been planning a site makeover for a few weeks now and are going to start implementing our plans for a cleaner, simpler, more beautiful user interface for viewers to interact with.

After seeing Facebook come out with their lite version earlier this week it certainly reminded us that getting back to our core purpose (delivering quality video entertainment in an enjoyable way) is what we want to do.

It’s also important to our video sharing site because we plan on delivering a good amount of video content originating from Spidvid’s collaborative production community later this year.

We expect to release UnleashVideo.com Lite early next month in October.

+   

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.

If you’ve been following our Twitter account over the last few weeks, you know that we’ve had issues with our unleashing functionality.

We are happy to announce that we have fully restored all functionality, so all systems are a go again.

We have also taken additional precautions to ensure that our servers are more protected from unwanted future attacks.

So if you have some great quality entertaining videos, we would love to review them and feature them on our site.