MacMost Now 199: Video Sharing With mDialog

In this MacWorld Expo special, learn about mDialog, a video sharing solution that works well with Macs, iPhones, iPods and Apple TV.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Gary Rosenzweig: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Today's MacWorld Expo special, I look at mDialog, an easy way to get into video publishing on the web. 
So I often get asked if there's an easy way to get into video publishing on the web. And there are a lot of different free solutions out there. But there's one that's very Mac friendly and it's mDialog. I caught up with them at MacWorld Expo 
Greg: Hey I'm Greg Fieldberg from mDialog. I'm the founder and the president and we're here at MacWorld and I wanted to just talk to you a little bit about what mDialog is all about. 
So we're an online video delivery platform and we focus really hard at being good at four things: the publishing, the engagement, the distribution, and monetizing video content on the web. 
On the publishing side we're doing a couple of cool things. We'll release a Safari plug-in that will encode, describe and upload a video using QuickTime's MPG-4 H264 codec and what that will do is create three versions of your video: an iPhone optimized video, a web version and an HD version. And all of that gets delivered to the right devices because our systems know if it's an iPhone it's calling up the video. Or if it's a set-top box like Apple TV that'll get the HD version. 
On the engagement side, we've got announcements and some different things that we're doing here. We really believe that you've got to engage your audience. The web gives you a back channel so that you can have a dialogue with your audience. 
So to do that we've got a survey engine where you can hang surveys at the beginning or at the end of your video and poll or engage your audience. We also have something called the collaboration feature where you can let your audience submit videos into your channel. You can approve them or reject them and you're kind of outsourcing your video channel.
As well we also just released a contest adder, which allows someone to create a contest or a film vessel embedded in your site using our embedded player. Your audience can sign up to the contest and can use our mLoader technology to encode and upload their short film for example and then they have the choice to allow the audience to vote in on that. 
So a few other collaboration features or engagement features that we have are grading, voting, send to a friend, email to a friend. 
On the distribution side we strongly believe that the video should follow the audience around, not the other way around. And so to do that we have the three screens, we have an iPhone app that allows you to have all these features, enter the contests and do all that off of our iPhone app. But as well, Safari on the iPhone will also present our embedded player. It allows you to not just view videos on the Safari but you can shuffle through the episodes with your embedded channel player, which is kind of cool. 
And then we also reach the web of course, we're fully Mac, PC compatible and everything I've just mentioned. And we actually make our way into the living room with set-top boxes such as Apple TV and Tivo.
Well, we've got a couple of different price points. We have a free one that really allows people to have fun with it to get started. And then we also have what we call a friends and family and that's $49.95. And then we go to an Indy membership and a broadcaster membership and the broadcaster goes all the way up to half a terabyte of online storage, as well 2 terabytes of video delivery a month and we can go well beyond that. 
Gary: One of the cool things about mDialog is that they have iPhone specific solutions. So when you publish your videos, they can appear in the iPhone on the browser or they can also appear on the mDialog app. 
Greg: Our embedded iPhone player on Safari on the iPhone, it shows you that obviously you can just press the play button and it'll play the video. But something that we added to the mix is the ability to shuffle through videos in the channel. You can do that like this. Which is kind of cool. This channel has about five or six different videos on it and so it allows the publisher to really do that once and they didn't have to do anything specific for the iPhone. This is the best way to present a channel on the iPhone. 
But we really want them to take advantage of things that the iPhone can do and for that we have our own video app on the iPhone, it's in the app store and it's free. There's all different channels that video publishers are putting on there. 
Gary: You can find out more and sign up for a free account at mdialog.com. Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig for MacMost Now.
MacMost Now 199: Video Sharing With mDialog

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