TalentTrove – Share Your Talent on Video
Whatever your skill, if you can film it you can share it on this site to attract more viewers and perhaps even get talent-spotted. It could be comedy, music, writing, news reporting, acting, fashion, cooking or a variety of other talents typical of TV: TalentTrove lets you set up a free account to upload and share your videos in an organised way with an interested community.
The site is very neatly organised making it easy to set up your account and select the right categories from the toolbar and submenus so viewers can find your videos. It’s also quick and easy to find videos on the subjects that interest you. I went straight to comedy and watched the most popular videos, then set up my own account to upload my online interview shows so I gave it a good test.
The steps for uploading videos are straightforward if you’re uploading files from your own computer or selecting videos from your YouTube channel. I usually need to use embed code as my shows are on another website, and there wasn’t an easy option to do this – I’m sure it must be available on TalentTrove somewhere and it would be handy to have it on the main upload screen. With more and more people broadcasting their own talent and taking part in citizen journalism this site is an excellent idea and one that I’ll certainly use myself.
Bitly.TV – Most Watched Videos
Bitly TV aggregates the most watched videos for the present day, the last day and the last two days shared by members of the Bit.ly community. The home page shows an interesting assortment of screen shots you can click on to see what the world is watching and it’s very tempting to view them. It has grown out of the Bit.ly service which lets users post links, and analyses this data to highlight the most popular videos which are going viral. The designers say it’s ‘like the internet itself’ combining the highly serious with the trivial and humorous.
To identify the most viewed videos Bitly TV sorts them using an algorithm they describe as going beyond the number of clicks on the Bit.ly links. Instead it also includes retweets and other community actions such as the number of times Bit.ly users have shortened and shared a video. Bitly TV includes a spam filter to cut out material that could offend its viewers. Take a look at the website to see how you can take part in the Bit.ly community. The videos on the front page are mainly from YouTube.
VideoLobby – Easy Online TV Broadcasting
The designers say this website makes broadcasting your online TV shows as easy as blogging, and it certainly is easy to set up a channel. In minutes you can have set up your own channel, your show names and logos, and have scheduled your first episode. Video tutorials take you through the necessary steps so that even a first-time broadcaster could manage. After that the service is designed mainly for people wanting to broadcast by streaming live and then archive a show to broadcast as a repeat later on the channel.
Your channel will show an ‘Off Air’ screen while you aren’t streaming, and once your episode is being broadcast you can add members to the team to work on it and even allow viewers to comment during the broadcast, with or without moderation. All of this is very like Livestream, the benefit being that VideoLobby feels easier to set up and use with all the video tutorials and links to a Wiki page for extra tips. In fact the Wiki pages are invaluable for anybody interested in broadcasting because they’re so full of information.
It’s not quite so easy to see how to broadcast shows users might already have in their own archives. Other services allow shows to be easily imported from other places including YouTube. All of this might be possible on VideoLobby to make it a complete service for people wanting to set up and run a channel, but an extra video tutorial is needed to explain how to do it, plus easier step-by-step guidance on the menus.
Socially!