Being a video site, VidSF needed a world–class video player. After studying the video players for every major video site I could find, studying what works and what doesn’t, I ended up with the custom player skin to your right, designed in Flash for the open source JW Player.
VidSF provides more than just videos to publishers, we provide services to help them create the videos that they want to see, themselves. One of these services is the creation of customized video player skins, and below are some that I made for our friends at SF Appeal and Mission Local. Further below is some information on the plugins that went into the VidSF player.
There was an existing Google Analytics plugin for JW Player, but it wasn’t intended for our approach: videos distributed across a wide syndication network.
So, with the intuitive and thankfully well–documented Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash library, I was able to make a plugin that reports back to Google Analytics from wherever the video is being displayed, to record which video it is, which site is showing it, and how often the video is played.
Chances are you saw a pre–roll advertisement if you clicked to play any of the above videos. Those are provided by LiveRail, VidSF’s advertising network of choice. It took around a month, a lot of coffee, and some deep customizations to get LiveRail and JW Player to work together, and while my resolve may have faltered at several points, a functional integration somehow emerged.
We also double up on analytics and use Quantcast in addition to Google Analytics, because it allows for a public analytics profile, making it very popular with advertisers and marketers. For example, here’s our Quantcast profile for the VidSF Network.
This one is quite similar to the Google Analytics plugin, in both function and execution. It uses Quantcast’s API to communicate with their servers and store which video is being played, from where, and how often.
There isn’t a Quantcast plugin yet for JW Player, so I’m hoping to clean this up a bit and open source it if I can find time, thus earning my Open Source Contributor merit badge.
Copyright Steve Cochrane, 2009.