The amount of video on Facebook is increasing almost 4X per year. With that flood of new videos, Facebook has been optimizing the way we consume content. One of the biggest (and most controversial) has been Facebook’s adoption of in-line video playback.
65% of Facebook users say that they are watching Facebook videos on their mobile devices. Taking that into consideration, we at Bubbl have re-engineered our Facebook social sharing flow to allow our users clips to play inline in the Facebook feed. So, now when a user shares a clip, instead of being re-directed to a Bubbl hosted share page, the clip can be viewed directly from the Facebook feed.
We did, however, come across one challenge when implementing the new share architecture. Our publisher partners rely on our clips deep linking ability for tracking and click-through to source content. Facebook does not currently support the ability to add a click-through link to in-line video, so our development team has been tasked with creating a product that is more deeply integrated with Facebook. This will ensure the most optimal clip viewing experience for our users while maintaining our core value proposition for our clients.
We will definitely be re-visiting our Facebook share flow to iterate it as Facebook grows and changes. Stay tuned for more updates regarding in-line video play as well as for our experiments with Facebook Live. Until then, enjoy your favorite Bubbl clips from directly within your feed.
Our core mission at Bubbl is to make every piece of video on the internet interactive. To do that requires careful planning and diligence to ensure that our underlying technology can handle the vast range of web based video. Given the many video formats, video players, CDNs, asset management platforms, etc., building a product that integrates seamlessly is a real challenge.
As we work day in and day out to build a product that meets the needs of our clients and users, we became more and more aware of a big piece of the pie we were missing - user generated content. So many of the videos our users watch and share on a daily basis are not on a publisher website or OTT platforms, but on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. So with that in mind, we set out to build one of the most ambitious products we’ve released to date.
Our users can now simply copy and paste a link to a video into our website and begin clipping that video right away. Our engineering team completely re-thought our core clipping architecture and constructed custom methods for on-demand clipping. We’re able to deliver the premium cliping experience our users are used to, outside of the confines of a publishers site.
Drop-To-Clip is now live at www.bubbl.me. Check it out and let us know what you think!
As we speak with content publishers and creators in the digital media industry, we continually run into small to medium sized companies that rely on the ease of the Wordpress and video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo to publish their content. With these “long-tail” publishers in mind, we are excited to announce our Bubbl Wordpress Plugin!
Root for Bubbl’s Project Manager, James Stern, as a contestant on the debut season of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s new live-streaming show, “The Runner”!
James will be ½ of “The Brogrammers.” We’ll be sure to post clips created with Bubbl’s tech so you can keep up on his progress. :-)
Twitter is a very natural and obvious place for our users to share Bubbl clips. The inherent value of Twitter is the ease with which users can quickly share their thoughts or information. We have a similar mission in that we want people to have the ability to share JUST their favorite part of a video and not the whole five minutes. In order to maximize the watchability of our clips on Twitter, our product and engineering team worked together to create a new Twitter share card.
When a user shares a clip to Twitter, they now see a unique Bubbl branded card. All of the clips being shared on Twitter will now have a uniformity and users will begin recognizing videos as Bubbl clips. The videos play inline in the twitter feed so followers can watch the clip without leaving their feed. If after watching the clip the viewer wishes to view the whole video, a link is conveniently provided.
Creating our own Twitter card also allows us to include users captions and text overlays, enhancing the clip sharing experience.
Our new Twitter cards are live now. Try creating a clip on one of our partner sites or on www.bubbl.me and let us know what you think!
Bubbl is excited to announce our newest Publisher Partner - The International Ice Hockey Foundation!
The IIHF, founded on May 15, 1908 in Paris, France, is the governing body of international ice hockey and inline hockey. The IIHF features 77 member associations, each of which is the national governing body of the sport in its nation. Besides controlling the international rulebook, processing international player transfers, and dictating officiating guidelines, the IIHF runs numerous development programmes designed to bring hockey to a broader population. The IIHF also presides over ice hockey in the Olympic Games, and over the IIHF World Championships at all levels, men, women, juniors under-20, juniors under-18 and women under-18. Each season, the IIHF in collaboration with its local organising committees, runs around 25 different World Championships in the five different categories.
Our Clip This tech is now live on the IIHF website. Try it out here!
