The Blogging Monkeys: Introducing our New Video Page & Player

If you’ve noticed, we recently launched a new video player, as well as a redesigned video page! The new video player and page was the result of many hours of hard work. We worked around the clock to implement all new the behavior. We had folks creating css, slicing images, implementing behaviors for the new tabs and behaviors for the new scrolling pane. Then, we brought it all together and tied it in with the data that drives the page.

What does that mean for you, the viewer? Well, in addition to a cool new design, there are many functional improvements as well. First, you can now easily view all the segments in the video series simply by clicking on the film icon in the player bar. Doing so pops up the thumbnails, which you can scroll through to the right or left and select another segment to watch.

To the immediate right of the thumbnail button is a button that gives the viewer the ability to view the video full-screen--definitely helpful for those hard-to-see shots. To the right of that—the tool icon in the far bottom-right—provides the ability to zoom or use slow-motion. One additional cool feature with the zoom is that after selecting how much you want to zoom, you can actually drag the mouse around to focus what part of the screen you want to zoom into. Clicking on the tools icon again will remove the menus.

Finally, if you click the ‘Share’ button in the bottom-left corner of the player, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can submit the video to various bookmarking sites, send an email of the video to a friend, or embed the video on your website or blog. To give you still more options, if you click the appropriately-named “Options” button near the bottom, you will have the ability to embed different sized players—even a custom size of your choosing. Once you’ve selected the size, simply click “Copy Embed Code” and then paste into your web page. It’s that easy! Clicking the “Share” button one more time (or the “Close” button) will instantly start the video playing again.

Moving on to the new video page design—the goal was to enhance the navigation and aesthetics of the page. You'll now find other related videos conveniently to the right of the player. Plus, if you scroll down the page, you'll find still other videos to watch. We also moved the video details, such as view count, star ratings, etc, and the transcript up the page, so that you can now watch the video at the same time as viewing them. Finally, we've made it easy to post your favorite video to popular bookmarking sites, by providing links beside the video, as well as on the 'Share' screen in the video player.

Overall, the entire redesign process was a team effort. It's still a work in progress as more content is planned for this page we've still got room to make the page faster, but we’re pleased with the new look and hope that you like it as well. Please let us know what you think!