First off, Happy New Year! Here's hoping 2012 is a happy, healthy and prosperous year for you. If you're a fan of SpaceRef then 2012 is going to be a great year. I've been working on the business plan for some time and as of today we start executing the new plan.
In July I compared Brightcove to YouTube and said I would provide feedback after a few months. Well yesterday I received an email from Brightcove informing me that our free OnOrbit corporate account which was based on advetising revenue sharing was being discontinued as of December 17th and I had the option to become a paid customer.
Now getting back to the my previous post where I was comparing traffic each service generated all I can say is that YouTube has continued to blow Brightcove out of the water. In fact not too long ago I posted a video to YouTube that got picked up by Wired and the next thing we knew it had 249,026 views and we saw our subscribers jump dramatically. So now that we have to make the decision on Brightcove I think YouTube has already made it for us. So in the future you'll see all our videos on our YouTube channel. And now that you can view them in their pristine hi-res version, so much the better.
A little over a month ago I started a little experiment. I wanted to compare usage between our SpaceRef Brightcove video channel and our newly created SpaceRef YouTube channel. Up to that point SpaceRef had been using Brightcove exclusively as our video service provider.
The numbers should not have surprised me as YouTube has a tremendous lead over everyone else. But still I was. I uploaded a small selection of current videos to our SpaceRef YouTube channel that were also on our Brightcove channel and did absolutely no promotion for them. None. I didn't link to them from SpaceRef or any of the sites on the SpaceRef network. What was the result? For the 1 month test run our YouTube channel had 29% more individual video views. That's pretty impressive.
There are some difference though between the two services. I find that the Brightcove channel has a little better video quality. As well Brightcove has for some time allowed you to monetize your channel and it's only recently that YouTube has integrated AdSense.
For the time being we're going use both video channels and compare them as we go. I'll report back in a few months on our progress.
It's time for some self promotion. Last Thursday I announced on SpaceRef that we were launching a new service called On Orbit. What On Orbit is, or will comprise is still a company secret. However I can say that it will be a personalized and interactive service.
It will start out as an Alpha service, and will soon become a Beta service open to everyone and then some time later come out of Beta. It's an invitation only service right now. You can request yours from the On Orbit web site. Based on the early numbers I don't think we'll have a problem meeting our target of Alpha testers.
On Orbit will be the first product from SpaceRef where the community has a voice in what the service will become and I'm excited at the opportunity of having the space community involved, whether it's a student or an experienced engineer or an executive. Stay tuned for more teasers as we get closer to our Alpha launch date.
I think it's about time for me to promote SpaceRef as we've added several news sites, updated our mobile site and added new RSS feeds.
Today I added RSS feeds for Moon Today, Jupiter Today and SpaceRef Europe. That means that we now have 13 RSS feeds for the SpaceRef Network. Personally I think we provide the most extensive RSS feed collection of space news available.
Recent new sites or major update to sites include:
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