Category: Shows

Dog days of summer? What dog days of summer?

Here at Revision3, we’re cranking it up like it was October, not August. We’ve got two huge announcements today, one that brings you great new functionality to our website, and another that brings you a wonderful new show to watch.

BRAND NEW SHOW: Let’s start with the new show! I’m proud to announce that today we’re launching AppJudgment, which will bring you reviews of mobile phone applications, including those for the iPhone, Android phones, Blackberry, Pre and even Windows Mobile.

This show is a little different for Revision3, as it sits somewhere in between our longer form shows like HD Nation and Tekzilla, and our shorter, daily Tekzilla Tip of the Day. We’ll be releasing new episodes of AppJudgment three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and each will generally run between two and four minutes. Each episode will focus on either a single application, or 2-4 apps in the same category. It’s a little like what you might see as a segment on Tekzilla, but in this case we’re releasing it as its own show.

Why not just do one a week with three segments? In part, because we think the shorter form segments more closely match how many people view videos online. Video viewing habits are changing – while many people like full shows, other simply like watching a few minutes, focused on a single topic, and then prefer to surf elsewhere – in effect rolling their own programs.

But whichever way you like, we’ve got the solution for you. If you like shorter, specific segments, watch AppJudgment every day. And if you’d rather watch longer shows, simply subscribe via iTunes, Miro, TiVo or many other services, and watch once a week. The effect, as it were, will be almost the same.

Oh, and we’ve also developed separate feeds for each platform – so if you’d rather just get the iPhone app reviews, you can select just that feed. Beware though – you won’t be able to see what you’re missing. Rumor has it that a future episode will focus on Google Voice – so controversial, it was banned from the iPhone!

Oh, and another thing makes AppJudgment a little different for us. Instead of having a single host – or two hosts – AppJudgment is delivered via an ensemble cast of Revision3 employees. A wide range of our employees have pitched in to make the show great – you’ll see Patrick Norton and Ron Richards, but you’ll also see reviews from David Prager, Stephanie Chu, Mauricio Balvanera, Annie Gaus and others from the company too. Oh, and the show is produced by Eileen Rivera, who also handles production on Scam School and The Digg Reel! Keep watching, you’ll never know who might show up to talk about their favorite – or most hated – cellphone application!

You can watch AppJudgment here, or on any of our great distribution partners!

COOL NEW WEB FEATURE: And that brings me to our next announcement, a cool new web feature that brings the segment approach you see in AppJudgment to all of our shows at Revision3. This great new web feature now lets us create segments inside of each of our shows – that you can jump to, watch over and over again, and share with your friends.

Here’s how it works – and I’ll use the latest Diggnation as an example, but soon all of our shows will be segmentized going forward. Check out the latest episode of Diggnation viewable below. As you watch it online, you’ll notice that just below the player, in the Show Notes area, are a list of segment names. These “Segments” – or chapters, if you think like a DVD – correspond to each of the stories discussed in this episode of Diggnation, along with any other hilarity that might occur outside of a news story.

Click on the segment name and you’ll jump to a description of the segment. Click on the Play button and you’ll jump to the beginning of that segment, inside of our player, where you can start watching immediately.

But that’s not all. Our video player timeline now includes little dots, which indicate the start of each segment. Hover over the markers and you’ll see a pop-up segment description (thanks to Rob Sandie, and the Viddler team, for pioneering this innovation). Click on the marker, and again you’ll jump just to the start of that segment.

Want to see the segments in the player, while you watch the video? Again, if you hover over the video as it is playing, you’ll see a row of buttons to the right. We’ve added a new one to “Share”, “Embed”, “Discuss” and “More Videos”. It’s (you probably guessed this already) called “Segments”. Click on it and you’ll see a list of all the segments, with your show video to the left.

If you love watching our shows, and don’t want anything to do with this segment stuff, don’t worry! We haven’t changed the basic viewing experience. But if you’d like to just watch that cool Blu-Ray player review, or twitter about Kevin and Alex talking about how humans actually emit light (a real segment this week), we’ve made it drop-dead simple to do so.

Oh, and this is just a start. In a few days it’ll be even easier to share these segments with your friends, and promote them on Digg and other social news services. We’re really excited about the new features, and I encourage you to play around with them, and let us know what you think in the forums.

And a big thanks to our tremendous web team, who delivered this great new functionality in such a cool, elegant and useful way!

– Jim Louderback