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.

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.