VIDEO DISTRIBUTION ON THE INTERNET
How to get your video in front of a large audience on the web

By Lorraine Grula - Internet Video Gal

One reason video is such a marvelous way for Internet business owners to reach potential customers is the fact that distribution and hosting is free.

There are tons of video sharing sites on the web eager to provide you with services that get your video creation in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Each has its own distinct personality and demographic base. In order to distribute your videos most effectively, you need to know the different video sharing sites and what they want. That way, you can target your videos to the best audience.

You don’t want to bother uploading that incredible retirement planning video to a website that caters to teenage heavy metal fans.

Here at www.VideoProductiontips.com, we review and critique all the different video hosting websites and report their pros and cons back to you. This article is about www.Blip.tv

My money is on www.Blip.tv as one of the best video sharing sites that will no doubt be entertaining folks for eons to come. It only takes a few minutes sampling Blip’s content to realize that plenty of people out there are creating content worth watching and Blip gathers it all in one-easy-to-watch place. The larger budget network shows would be smart to be intimidated by some of the quality stuff on the net and blip is a good example.

Like all internet video, blip claims their mission is to provide an alternative to the corporate controlled selection of network television. Blip wants to capture and deliver the essence of internet video…the homemade, the hip, the unusual, the personal, the stuff people want to watch because network TV is predictable and boring.

That’s what blip says they provides to the audience…now, what do they say they provide to the video content provider?

Blip.tv promises video content producers they will deliver a large, targeted audience and take care of all the technical and storage issues for free. Unlimited bandwidth. Your own blog and channel. Great stuff, all giving you the opportunity to communicate with millions using the most powerful communication tool ever invented…video.

Distribution beyond Blip is another feature of blip not found everywhere. Once you upload to blip, you can easily access syndication to AOL Video, Yahoo! Video, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MSN Video, Google Video, Blinkx, iTunes and the Apple TV, Blogger, and WordPress.com. That indeed makes life easier for the Intnernet video producer.

Blip also makes it easy to distribute your video to your own blog, to MySpace, to del.icio.us, Yahoo! Video and iTunes.

Much like a traditional TV network show, Blip makes money off advertisers, not their content providers or viewers. It’s free to upload videos to blip.tv because they have formed a network of advertisers to match your video content with—if you want. They won’t force you to let them stick an ad on the front of your show. But if you do, they split the revenues with you 50-50.

Compared to the bigger video sharing sites like Google, blip is extremely responsive and helpful. They seem to be trying harder. The site contains plenty of easy to understand tutorials on everything from how to upload and distribute to what kind of video editing software to use.

But here’s the real treat…Contact information for extra help is easily accessible. Try finding an email on Google Video to reach a human being if you have problems!

Blip obviously attracts many of the more talented internet video content producers, which in turn attracts the more savvy viewer. Blip shows tend to be slick and well-produced, not just the endless stream of shaky cat-stuck-in-the-dishwasher videos you see populating some sites.

Video sharing sites are competing for the millions of viewers who are spending increasing amounts of time in front of their internet screen watching TV instead of actually watching their TV sets.

Since all those viewers are out there demanding content at the click of a mouse, video sharing sites are often somewhat desperate for content to satisfy the hording masses. So most welcome submissions, but that’s probably a mistake in the long run.

Each site is trying to perfect their image in the marketplace. They don’t want to offer their viewers crap. Since the pickings are slimmer than they’d like, they might accept crap, but no doubt crap will float to the bottom of the barrel. Unfortunately for marketers, viewers often think of commercials as crap, regardless of how well they’re done. Providing practical information in a demonstration video is a better alternative than making your video presentation strictly promotional. Blip says they won’t even accept commercials, so the definition of “commercial” becomes an issue. An infomercial passes the test because the “info” part outweighs the “mercial” part.

In my opinion, the pickier the site is about submissions, the better its chances for long term survival in a competitive marketplace, which is why I think blip.tv is a long term winner.

Go check out www.blip.tv as a great place to share your Internet video creation with the world.

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