We completed our rolling update this morning and I'm happy to report that everything went as planned. The improvements I spoke of in my last post are live and we're looking for feedback on what everyone thinks. Next week we will be starting the planning process for our next series of development sprints which will focus on online analytics packages and one of the most requested enhancements to date: Subfolders.

In the meantime, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on public vs. private content. Screencast.com has always kept your content exactly where you wanted it - secured by a password or in an authenticated folder or playlist, or in your publicly-visible Library, folder or playlist. While it's possible for someone to "stumble" onto your public content, we don't do anything to promote your public content with search engines. In fact, we do everything we can to prevent search engines from crawling through the system and indexing content. This is partly by design since Pro account users pay for the bandwidth that's used when their content is consumed. It seemed disingenuous to us to openly promote content only to then ask you to pay for the cost of popularity. However, many of you are asking for help in getting your content "found", and it would be relatively easy for us to assist content owners in the process of exposing their public content to the myriad of search engines that are out there these days.

So, what do you think? A lot of you have indicated that you want your content to be found and consumed. Why else would you have created it in the first place? However, increased exposure of your content could have consequences depending on how popular it becomes. I'd like to hear from you all on the subject. Feel free to post comments or send me your feedback.

Happy Screencasting!

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager
Screencast.com

Lately I've been remiss updating this blog with news and my views. It's been a pretty cold summer up here in the Great Lakes, maybe that's affected my ability to type. It certainly hasn't been because of a lack of anything to write about. Back in June I mentioned that we were beginning to focus on improving the scalability of Screencast.com. I'm happy to report that our efforts have been successful and we're just about finished with some of the more significant aspects of that process. This means that we'll be turning our attention back to the fun stuff that you all have been asking for - features!

At the end of this month, we're releasing an updated version of the MediaRoll which will let everyone customize the look to match their own preferences. Here's an example of a MediaRoll in action on the Jing Blog. If you have an existing MediaRoll embedded on a Web page or blog, and you want to take advantage of the new capabilities, you'll need to re-embed the new object. Of course existing MediaRolls will continue to work just fine. At release time, we'll have tutorials available in the Screencast.com Help Center to walk you through the steps to customize your own. After our release at the end of this month, we will start work on allowing users to customize other aspects like the Library and Folder views.

We will also be releasing an updated Flash Player that will let viewers seek to a point in a video that has not yet been downloaded. This will enhance viewing experience by not having to wait until the entire video is downloaded before viewers can jump to a section that's later in the production. By itself, this is a pretty neat idea that gives the playback of MP4 content streaming media-like capabilities. However, TSC products will be able to take advantage of this feature in unique and valuable ways in the future. Imagine when lengthy Camtasia Relay (TechSmith's lecture capture software) and Camtasia Studio videos will contain tables of contents with headings that relate to points in the video that have yet to be downloaded. Jumping to those points will be faster, especially for those viewers with slow Internet connections.

We're still working on redesigning the playlist. I know that it's taking a lot of time - I wish I could just wave a wand and fix everything. What it has done is cause us to rethink how people today share their playlists, folders, and individual pieces of content. We want to make sure we're making the new playlist the best it can be while ensuring existing playlists and other shared content remain viewable. Our team has completed several brainstorming and work-flow design sessions and we are planning to test some ideas that we've developed, with help from recruited volunteers of course.

Like I said, we haven't been wasting time playing golf all summer...well...I shouldn't speak for everyone. I have a lot more to share, but I don't want to spill all the beans just yet. Besides, I need something to write about next month. Happy Screencasting!

Dirk Frazier
Screencast.com Product Manager
TechSmith Corporation

There are only a couple things left to do this summer. For instance, I have a gnawing project at home that I just haven't finished. I've been busy painting the house (how's that for a fun 'staycation'?). It's all finished, except for one spot; the ceiling in the entry way. Started it, just haven't finished the edges. It really wouldn't be so bad, except when I turn on the light at night for the front door and welcoming someone in. Then I suddenly remember, "oh yeah, I need to finish the ceiling in here..."

Well, luckily TechSmith is a little better at getting stuff done than I am. This week we're pushing a handy little feature that we've been meaning to get to all summer; the ability to send custom email invitations.

Here's a little Jing video showing how this works:

What's nice is that we're still working on a lot of other features for Screencast.com. And, we really appreciate the feedback many of you gave us recently in our customer survey. We're looking at what you want closely. More than a few mentioned multiple user accounts (which we're working on) and viewer statistics and analytics.  Those are the top features on our list too.

So, keep the feedback coming and let us know what you think of the new custom email invitations. Happy screencasting!

The Screencast.com team has been working hard to improve the service and speed up content access to a significant degree. I think you will be pleasantly surprised, but as always, if you have any problems please feel free to contact TechSmith's Technical Support team.

We decided to take the time recently to improve service performance because we've grown substantially over the past 12 months. We now have more than 600,000 users and a lot of customer requests and features that we want to implement. However, all the bells and whistles in the world would be meaningless if the service can't meet demand. So, that's what we've been focusing on. I hope you appreciate the results.

We were able to also address some of the feedback regarding our resizing feature. The content is now displayed with higher quality when scaled down, and you can dynamically resize the content without interrupting the playback. I think it works great now but yes, we'll be working in the near future on the option to turn it on or off as desired.

We are in constant improvement mode and are still planning on improving viewer stats and analysis (there's a great article that shows you what we offer today), implementing some kind of search option for content owners (and maybe even external viewers depending on feedback we receive), multiple account purchasing and other requested features; so be sure to keep checking back for updates on our future development efforts.

As always, send us some feedback to let us know what's on your mind. I do read all messages I receive and respond personally to as many as I can. But most importantly - Happy Screencasting!

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager
Screencast.com

Hi - I am Barb Hernandez, the User Experience Manager at TechSmith. I manage a team of designers and researcher who work with the product teams here at TechSmith.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend an evening with a group of graduate students at University of Michigan's School of Information (SI). These students are studying, among other things, Human Computer Interaction. Each month they get together for a Design Jam where they work on a design problem for a local company or organization. At our jam session, students looked at the concepts we have for sharing content on Screencast.com: Media Roll, Playlists and Folders, but focused on the idea of the "Playlist" as a mechanism for sharing content when that content is organized in more than one folder on Screencast.com. They also tackled the differences between sharing and viewing shared content.

During the session the group reviewed the design problem in detail then broke into smaller groups to brainstorm and mock up potential solutions. Each team had great ideas to improve the workflow, simplify the concepts and generally make it easier to create, share and view content.

Some pictures of the design ideas from each of the 5 groups can be found here: http://www.screencast.com/t/NspigGSSXC.

Please feel free to add your thoughts or feedback on these ideas or even add your own solution. More details about each solution is in the comments section for each group's design ideas.

If you've ever wanted to remove the TechSmith and/or Screencast.com branding from your content view page, or customize the page by changing the Header, Footer, or Background colors, or even applying your own logo, now you can. With our latest update, Screencast.com Pro users now have more control than ever over how their content is viewed. We have written tutorials and screencast videos over at the Help Center to help you through the process (but it's pretty intuitive anyway). And while we were at it, we added for everyone new navigation controls and thumbnails on the view page, and an auto-scale option that will help get large formatted content to better appear in the user's browser window - without actually re-encoding or modifying the original content resolution. We hope you enjoy the improvements. Let us know what you think and as always - Happy Screencasting!

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager
Screencast.com

If you're like me, organizing both your physical desk and your computer desktop sometimes takes a back seat to other tasks and projects.
A lot of times I just put files and papers down that I need to work with right away, and then organize them later. If this is how you work with Screencast.com, we've made it easier to complete the organize later part.

So let's say you want to share a file immediately after uploading and you leave in your main library, and don't take the time to organize it. Or maybe you have a few files all related uploaded and you want to group them in a folder.

No problem. Now when you move your files the URL stays the same. I know I personally have a lot of files in my Jing folder... now I can organize them without breaking links that I sent out to customers, friends, and family. Not to mention all the customer videos I created, I can now sort them into folders that make more sense than when I created them a year ago.

Go try it out... organizing can still be a daunting task, but hopefully now, it's a little easier.

We've made a few other changes during this release as well. We also have a few other things underway that we're not quite ready to talk about - but know that we're making great progress on some features that we think you're going to appreciate.

I know that as a user of Screencast.com I am getting excited about the improvements coming and can't wait to see what you all think. And whether you like or loath the changes, we want to hear from you. We'd also love to hear your Screencast.com story.

Thanks,
Matt Pierce, TechSmith Training Manager
I Screencast - do you?

The Screencast.com team has been hard at work since last month's public launch. I told you all then that I was excited about the future of Screencast.com and I hope that our release scheduled for next Tuesday demonstrates what I'm talking about. Here's a peek at what will be on the menu:

MPEG-4 and H.264 support

Our Flash player will now support playing MPEG-4 content encoded with H.264, as well as FLV (with or without H.264), and SWF output created with Camtasia Studio or Jing. With the Quicktime and Windows Media Player browser plug-ins installed we still support .MOV (with and without H.264 encoding), and .WMV formats, so we're off to a good start with regard to supporting internet-based video content. We're still talking internally about Silverlight support so let me know your thoughts along those lines.

Media RSS (MRSS) support and auto-discovery

This is particularly exciting. I often use a public folder on Screencast.com to host a slew of vacation or event photos and then share the link to that folder. However, Screencast.com doesn't yet have a fancy view page with navigation controls, and so the better way to share the entire folder is with a Playlist, or embed a MediaRoll on my website or in a blog post. But even those options are somewhat limited by the design of the Playlist or my ability to update my Website quickly and easily. PicLens (http://www.piclens.com/) is an immersive, full screen environment that displays content (images and Flash video) as a dynamic wall of thumbnails. The wall can be manipulated with the click of a mouse to scroll and zoom, and you can switch to a "playlist-like" view of the folder contents with a single click. It has to be seen to be appreciated, but in my opinion, it's one of the neatest media display tools around, and mashing it up with your Screencast.com content is as easy as opening a public folder and clicking the PicLens icon in your browser's toolbar. If your viewer has PicLens installed in their Web browser, sharing a link to a folder of content just became the best view in the house.

There will be more coming on Tuesday so be patient and in the meantime, tell me what you think you need with regard to creating conversations around your media - we're working on threaded text comments and we're about to do our first iteration post-prototype. If you're interested in taking a look, drop me a comment or an email and we'll get in touch with you.

Dirk Frazier
Product Manager - Screencast.com
TechSmith Corporation

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!