Archive for August, 2008

We had another enjoyable Flag and Bell networking event on Tuesday night. The rain held off as our pub crawl took us from the Anchor Pub down cobbled side streets to Brew Wharf near London Bridge. Thanks again to PCR Recruitment for sponsoring drinks at the first pub.

Congratulations to the JMMK team for winning this month's quiz. Thanks to Wordtracker.com, Userplane.com and for this month's prizes.
The Flag and Bell also made it in to TNT Magazine on Monday. Check out the article, Network at the pub, on page 96.

In case you plan to attend Digital Hollywood's Building Block 2008 event in San Jose tomorrow, make sure to attend track IV - Technology Redefining the Future Web 2.0 Infrastructure: The Enabling Tools, Applications and Services. The track starts at 11:05 and our CEO & Co-Founder, Tom McGovern, will be one of the panelists.

Blogger will be unavailable Wednesday (8/6) at 6:00PM PDT for about 10 minutes for maintenance.

Update: This is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

Blogger will be unavailable Wednesday (8/6) at 4:00PM PDT for about 10 minutes for maintenance.

Update: This is now complete. Thanks for your patience.

If you are a developer and have ever wished to bring the Yahoo! Music experience into your site, now you can do it. Today Yahoo! have made available to the public the new Yahoo! Music API.

The Yahoo! Music API give developers and publishers open access to one of the most complete music catalog online. You can now access and browse Yahoo! Music’s vast content of high quality videos, artists and albums through charts, search, recommendations, and more.

Is music video the missing part that your audience is looking for? Here’s an example of application that you could build:

That’s a great way to captivate your users through the video playback and video stations included with the embedded player.

Integrating Yahoo! Music’s content into your site is now a simple task. Here are some basic steps to get started.

Enjoy!

Nicola Ghezzi
Yahoo! Music

Over the past several months we have rolled out a number of enhancements to our music video service.

As many of you already know, we took a big step in March by moving from a pop-up video player to an embedded player. This new experience provides for more seamless playback and improved sharing features.

We’ve also introduced some other cool features and enhancements that I’d like to share with you.

Upgraded video quality:
We recently upgraded our encoding specifications and are now providing 16×9 format videos when available. These new settings look fantastic and scale very well for the ‘full screen’ mode. Here’s a capture of a new 16×9 video from the band Paramore.

Video stations:
We have a comprehensive offering of over 50 video stations that give users a one-click option to launch great laid back video experiences. These stations are editorially programmed in the same manner as their radio counterparts and include everything from Today’s Big Hits to Chill Out to 2008 Grammy Nominees. If users are more interested in new discoveries, they can easily browse all video titles in each of these stations and sort by most popular, alphabetically by artist, or by newest. We continue to offer the standard browsing menu including My Station, Top 100, New Videos, Recommended, Videos I’ve Rated, and Video Premieres.

Sharing:
The new share panel in the player enables users to easily send a link of the video, share via IM or email, or embed.

Playlists:
With the new embedded video experience, we introduced the ability for users to add videos to playlists without interrupting viewing. To date, our users have created millions of video playlists!

Catalog:
We remain focused on building the most comprehensive and highest quality music video catalog on the web as well as providing accurate data and category tags for every video in the catalog. Want to see more videos in the same category as the video you are currently watching? Simply click on any of the category links and they will take you to a page with all the videos in that category. It’s a very useful discovery tool.

Enjoy, and let us know what new music video features you want to see. More updates to come!

Thanks,

Steve C.
Yahoo! Music