Upgrading! Some Video Catalog And Upload Functionality Is Down Today

We’re upgrading at our data center so some functionality may be down all or part of today. This specifically applies to adding new video catalogs and video upload functionality.  Everything should be normal again by 8am Sunday and we’ll celebrate by making our ForsaleByLocals wordpress plugin public.

AJAX Version of Personal Media Catalog Functionality Now Live

We’ll be adding drag and drop to the media catalog in the next few days.  I’m still traveling so you’ll hear more about this functionality in the next few days.

We’ll be doing more Mac specific testing starting soon as that is where most of the reported issues are coming from.  Please keep reporting issues that you find.  You can try out the functionality at http://vidlisting.com/beta/opencatalog.asp.

Putting Real Estate Video Conversion Servers Briefly Online For A Limited Public Beta Test

Want to try out our our new video upload and conversion mechanism? We’ll be briefly putting a small piece of the functionality online to see what types of videos we can and cant convert (we think that we know but we’ll see).  NOTE: these are just two beta servers that will be up for a few days but may come down at any time. Your uploaded content may be deleted at any time as well.

The process is a completely automated process. The interface is just a test interface with limited options. If you upload a video, you’ll get a link in your email where you’ll be able to preview the video online using the same large video that we use.  Though videos will be live, no uploads will be publically viewable on our site other than the preview link. Since we are only making two conversion servers available, the conversion machines may be busy at times – that’s part of the reasoning behind a limited public test.   Give feedback directly to me at tony@vidlisting.com

You can see current conversion server activity here in real time.

Again, this test is designed to put a realistic load on our servers for a few days and see what video codecs are out there. To repeat, uploaded content may be deleted at any time and the servers may be up or down at any given time without warning.  I’ll try to keep the latest schedule below but it may not be up to date:

Link To The Very Basic Beta Test Video Upload Interface: http://vidlisting.com/beta/betaupload_english.asp

 A Spanish language beta version is also available at http://vidlisting.com/beta/betaupload_spanish.asp

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7 December: 1am eastern:  UP / 3am: DOWN  / 4am: English UP / 4:20am Spanish UP

8 December:  UP all day

More Real Estate Video Functionality Moving From Private To Public Beta

We’ll be moving some significant real estate video functionality from private beta to public beta weekend no later than this upcoming weekend (likely before the weekend).  We’ve been making changes based on feedback during our private beta cycle for the last month or so.  Honestly, most of the functionality issues have been related either dealing with multiple languages or internal administration but we think that the big issues at least are ironed out. UPDATE: for those that have asked, the new public beta functionality has little to do with our recent post over on Active Rain where we ask for feedback about tests using 1024 pixel wide video. 

 I cant tell you how thrilled that I am that we are finally at the point of being able to make this real estate video functionality public (not to mention how happy that the majority of the team will be that they can finally work on something else  *grin* ). It is a fairly large project with lots of moving parts spread across multiple locations but we think that it might add some value for our customers.  

It’s the next small step in executing against our plan….

TheMoveChannel.com Partners With ForSaleByLocals And Vidlisting.com

***NOTE: After almost a year of working closely with the management and staff of The Move Channel (part of On The Move, Ltd.) in the UK on software development, video, and SEO projects, we can no longer recommend them in good conscience to our readers as a trusted real estate partner based on our experience with them. (18 May 2008)***

(This post also available in español)

–Original post removed–

ACOBIR Implements BienesRaicesVideo.com Real Estate Video Infrastructure For Panama

We are pleased to announce that ACOBIR (the Panama Association of Real Estate Agents and Promoters)  is the first announced beta partner to implement the BienesRaicesVideo.com real estate video infrastructure.  The implementation brings a significant real estate video capability to the ACOBIR website without any of the traditional bandwidth or management problems.

The implementation consists of three elements:

– A self updating real estate video bar on the home page of http://acobir.com.  Even though the site is in spanish, you’ll see the bar near the bottom of the home page. This element retains the look and feel of the overall page, is entirely geolocated without the need for Google maps, and is implemented with one line of HTML code. All video listings are managed by the bienesraicesvideo.com servers.  ACOBIR will be able to use their system of listing IDs.  UPDATED: We know that we have some work to do on this bar tomorrow with Firefox and likely Safari.  Fixed on both – tested on 5 browsers.

– A full size real estate video player page in multiple languages that retains the overall look and feel of the ACOBIR website.  Again, the visible content of the entire page is implemented with a single line of HTML code. You’ll see this page when you click on the video bar on the ACOBIR home page.  All content and bandwidth for the videos is provided by bienesraicesvideo.com servers.

– A video bar for the listing detail page: This functionality is not yet fully implemented due to some requirements on ACOBIR’s part.  But each listing will have the range of languages in which a given video is available.  This also is a one line implementation of HTML code that can easily be dynamically generated. The bar will look like the following on each detail page that has videos available: (nothing will appear on listings without videos)

ACOBIR members will be able to film properties themselves or contact the bienesraicesvideo.com office in Panama City for complete video services.  Congratulations to ACOBIR for implementing a fully functional video infrastructure that requires minimal administration and is managed externally while providing benefits to ACOBIR members and visitors to the ACOBIR web domain.  We have a number of other partner sites as we can now literally extend a subset of our videos to other websites with just a single line of HTML code.

Fixed A Bunch Of Fit And Finish Issues

We fixed a bunch of fit and finish issues on our pages that have been bothering me for some time.  I was up early this morning, checked off on each fix, and the fixes are now live on the site.  Nothing big….just some alignment issues, euro symbol inclusion, and other nagging issues in the interface for several of the pages ( including the long time burr in my side, the real estate video player page).

We didnt want any of these little issues to be focus of our beta testing of new functionality that should start later this week.

WordPress Releases Their Flash Video Player

Here is the link to the WordPress blog announcement: http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/05/26/video/

Great move especially with the size of their user base. It’s a paid premium feature for the moment – I’d be very surprised if it continues to be premium for a long time but even at a reasonable price point, people will use it…and use it for real estate video.

Part of the reason that we have not invested heavily in a Flash video player is that we have believed for a long time that the player is the most easily commoditized part of real estate video technology. Clearly, it wasn’t the message that people wanted to hear. I see the WordPress release as another big step in the movement towards the commodized flash player.  Perhaps WordPress’ actions will make it more apparent.  I think it is great move – making something a commodity when you are one of the larger players isn’t a bad thing.  Even as a premium service, wordpress will likely set the pricing bar for all of the verticals- that is not the position that we want to be in as a company….especially a small one.

All that said, we’ve had our own flash player in beta for some time but the difference is that our player is required to meet a very specific business purpose in the upcoming weeks. We’ll just stay focused on the basics: building an engaged audience, developing unique real estate video content in multiple languages, and focusing on solving the bigger technical “gotchas” on the back end of any web based service such as ours. 

Content Is King…And Content Creation Is The Key To Real Estate Technology Survival

Are Inline Video Search Results Really The End Game?

Instead of focusing on today’s benefit of having real estate video inline with search results, I’ll pose the question of “what will happen when potential visitors won’t need to go past Google pages for real estate information?” 

Thinking About Today Is Easy:  Take The Next Logical Step

Imagine an expanded Google universal search with listings presented inline with search results from Google Base for your search term, listings in adjacent areas geolocated with GeoRSS,  real estate video from YouTube, and photos from Google’s photo search.  Are we really that far right now from this scenario and, if we are not, why will people even visit real estate websites in the not-so-distant future if all of the information that they need is inline?

Possible Impacts on Real Estate Technology Industry

The future of running a viable business in real estate technology isn’t too hard to see.  Here are some places where viable business models will be hard to find:

– Presentation mechanisms: what percentage of people will click through to sites once competing listings and videos are presented in line with search results?  If the business model is primarily dependent on a presentation mechanism for listings or video, that business will be disintermediated rather quickly.

– Mashups of freely available data: The biggest issue here is barrier to entry – if the business model isn’t based on some new and not-so-easily acessible data (also qualifies as “content”) then even new approaches will quickly become commiditized.  Example: encoding US address information is commiditized.  However, gaining access to unique and helpful datapoints such as public transportation stops isn’t so easy to gain. Unique and difficult to gather content will always bring users.

If we think about the conceptual process for content as the following:

1) Conceptualization => 2) Access To Unique Content => 3) Content Creation => 4) Metadata Generation => 5) Search/Sort Capability=> 6) Presentation Mechanism

It is then reasonable to assume that the only areas not susceptable to disintermediation in the near term are #1, #2, and #3.  Google for example is hard at work improving #4, #5, and #6 – not much successful business model to be left there…

Unique Content Remains King

So unique content creation will clearly remain king (for a long while at least)…visitors will continue to value and seek out unique content thusly provide the foundation for viable business models.  Content in the form of written and multimedia blog posts, articles, photos, interviews, and local information will become the differentiator among organizations not the presentation mechanisms.  I suspect that NAR understands this with respect to the recent interactions between Move.com and Google (this also strengthens my suspicions as to Google’s motives above).  NAR’s unique content is their listing database with controlled access – far different from the average FSBO listing. 

Legitimate Winners In The Syndication Space May Be Close To Being Crowned

Although there is clearly a renewed call for the creation of real estate video, the syndication winner  in this space might already be in the process of legitimately being crowned (especially if the above scenario were to fully play out). Hint: the winners aren’t real estate video companies but large search companies. (UPDATE:  I have received confirmation that the only results to be displayed inline in search result will be YouTube or Google Video for the moment though this could change.)  The key point is that people have to get to a page to see *your* listing, mashup, or video player – if the visitor gets the info that they need before arrivig to your page, your ranking results won’t matter too much because you’ll never be seen.

Competing With “Free” And “Easy” Doesn’t Make Sense

Without a sustainable independent syndication business model, only the content creators and those with access with unique content will be left standing in the real estate video, mashup, and re.net listing spaces. It isn’t about being a “play” – it’s about building a business. Those that focus on easily commiditized presentation mechanisms will likely fall on hard times; those that conceptualize and create unique, hard to access content will survive. Those that don’t create content and base a business model on simply taking a revenue percentage from content creators are ultimately competing against “free” and “easy” – something that content creators will soon figure out.

Thoughts?

Post script: Here’s an interesting extension of this line of thinking…what if the “price” of a free real estate mapping mashup was that the data presented is stored for later use by Google?  As such, the real estate industry would have become the largest free labor pool for geolocating updated data about real properties and other related content throughout the US….with less effort and more participation than the big “Z”.

Real Estate Websites Of The Future

There is an excellent discussion of broker websites of the future over at TransparentRE.  This article exists only because perhaps I am a bit more ambitious in my hopes for the real estate website of the future. 

Platform Integration: Many of the more popular features currently only available via plugins will become integrated directly into blogging platforms. Some of my issues are just pet peeves centered on waiting for all those darn plugins to load; the other is around little details that these plugins generally didnt get right. Meebo wont let you change pages while chatting for example.  So, if I want to check out something interesting on your site that happens to be on a different page that I noticed while chatting, I have to wait even if the interesting content is on the same domain.  How “sticky” is that?  With the various instant messenger providers (MSN, AOL, Yahoo)  increasingly providing open interfaces to their products, the current plugin players will go away as blogging platforms build messenging capability directly over real messenging APIs back with huge supporting infrastructures. 

Better Aggregation of Local Content: All types of real estate content like articles, podcasts, and video are already portable via RSS, but interestingly, very little local content is aggregated soecifically for use (or consumption) by other external sites. The future will see inclusion of elements of geolocation as part of an automated aggregation process.  This automated geolocation process will be driven by the need to determine the proximity of content generated about one location to content generated about another. You are likely thinking this can be done on Google maps but google maps isn’t innately portable.

Better Portability And Integration of Local Content: So, how can we make the hyperlocal portable so that everyone can share photos, podcasts, articles, interviews, and videos about Elm Street? Unless there has been a recent change, Google Maps is not able to generate any sort of GeoRSS feed based off of data displayed on a specific map (which would be a killer feature by the way). Without that option, the only way to make hyperlocal content portable (and not expect every content generator to be looking up latitudes and longitudes) is to wrap geolocation data around content during some sort of aggregation process.  Users can then easily syndicate information for use on their own websites or blogs say from Redmond, WA along with some radius and get all of the hyperlocal information available at once from different sources without having to specify each town, street, or other feature along the way.  The smaller the radius the more hyperlocal the information (say 1/4 mile to 1/2 mile from a given address for example). 

More Use Of Video: It turns out that 2007  cannot yet be proclaimed as the year of “real estate video” as predicted by the soothsayers. Adoption rates and video views don’t support any such claim from the seller side or the nimbers of real estate property videos watched. But, there are a number of anecdotal indicators that usage of real estate video marketing is beginning to rise. Real estate sites have been using video for everything from property listings to self-promotion but it is the push into hyperlocal that is pushing forward videos centered on “neighborhood drivethrus” and such.  We are even beginning to push in more non-standard directions as evidenced by the industry’s own Andy Warhol of real estate video.

In summary, I’ve focused on infrastructure and platform plays as being the hallmark of future adoption. Anything that requires more than zero work on the part of the site owner may face adoption hurdles unless a huge and tangible amount of benefit comes with it.  I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next….where do you see things going?