It’s official! Screencast.com has lost its Beta tag and we’re tickled orange to be the first TechSmith product to benefit from our major corporate rebranding effort. Our design team, UX group, information developers, marketing folks, and programmers have been working hard these past few months to put a gorgeous new face on a work flow that seems to be working really well for everyone.

While we were at it, we made a few more improvements – like when you create a new folder, you now have the details dialog pop up for you automatically. We have a completely new Help Center that contains all your answers to questions you probably haven’t even thought of yet. We have a new Tools page that will point you in some interesting directions for content creation and sharing, and we now handle the new Adobe FLV content type correctly. We even have some shiny new hardware on the back-end that gives our multi-server architecture an even better level of performance.

Pretty graphics and bright colors notwithstanding, I think you will see for yourself just how easy it still is to upload, manage, and share your content with your customers, colleagues, and clan. So enjoy the new look and in a few days I’ll share a bit more about where we’re going from here (like H.264 encoded playback and creating a conversation around your content – oops that might be too much sharing )

After nearly 18 months of development and feedback, the Screencast.com logo is about to lose its Beta tag. We started out with a simple goal: to let our users upload, manage, and share their digital content (produced primarily in TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio) in a way that didn’t affect the original quality of that content, or the owner’s intellectual property rights. That’s it – nothing fancier was really defined when the original Screencast.com product idea was hatched. In the beginning, several obstacles stood in our way. Issues like an immature backend infrastructure, a confusing workflow, questionable design and UI elements, etc. I’m pleased to say that these issues have been addressed and with the completion of a rebranding effort that marks the beginning of a TechSmith-wide rebranding effort, the Screencast.com service has definitely grown up.

I think you’ll agree that what Screencast.com has become is in some ways similar to a pop-video hosting site where content can be uploaded and shared with people across the internet. But that’s where the comparison ends. While many of these sites take one type of video format and re-render it into a lower quality, smaller bit-rate video that’s easier for them to deliver (at the expense of your quality production), Screencast.com doesn’t do that. Instead, what we have morphed into is more like a basic online file system with a public and several secure storage mechanisms, a presentation layer (view page and Playlists), and easy to use sharing options. What’s even more exciting in my opinion is our use of RSS to deliver public content in a variety of ways. And while it’s relatively easy to understand our methods of storage, presentation, and sharing, it’s a little more complicated to fully grasp what RSS offers users of Screencast.com. So in a future post I’m going to take on the responsibility of talking about the many ways content owners can deliver their media using the powerful mechanism of RSS.

However, now is not the time to stand by and congratulate ourselves. Screencast.com has a LOT more to offer in the future; and while I don’t want to understate the importance of our unveiling of the new Screencast.com, it’s important to keep in mind that we’ve been releasing customer facing features and making improvements month after month for at least the past year. Given our TechSmith fueled foundation toward customer service and support, we will continue to do so for as long as our customers find value in what we produce.

So keep your thoughts and ideas coming and we’ll do our best to keep up with you, and happy screencasting!