Okay, it’s been a while since I’ve bothered to mention it - but PikSpot has finally released into public beta their community content platform. It’s certainly evolved since I first looked at it a few months ago. Before you fade out and assume this is just another network, let me give you a few of the more unique features these guys have offered the ol’ TechTV community-at-large:

• Vetted talent can have pre-defined RSS feeds consumed and included in the player automatically.
• You can place comments in an embedded piece of media - so long as you’re logged in.
• If you’re not logged in, you can do so from within the embedded media.
• If you don’t have an account, you can sign up for one from within the embedded media.
• Comments automatically show up wherever that media is visible - on the site, or through any embed!
• You can jump to any point in an audio / video file with little-to-no wait time (instant scrubbing).
• When jumping to a point in the timeline, you can set a Marker description (not unique to the Pikspot platform, but awesome nonetheless).
• Tags can be added by the community to any piece of media from within the embed.
• You can ea… oh, just look at the darned thing already:

That’s one of my favorite sessions from Gnomedex 6.0 (and as a reminder, registrations for the next Gnomedex in August are open - and seats are filling up quickly). Not sure I’m completely sold on the information architecture of the site or embed (in general), but that’s not going to keep me from really helping these guys with feedback and support. This is less about becoming a YouTube and more about enabling communities to create and organize original content.

Now, you should also know that PikSpot is working on:

• PodTrac integration
• a way to link off to vetted talent from within the embedded flash
• a way to surface more data through the embeds
• a way for original authors to edit metadata from within the embed
• ways to surface usable stats to media authors

Seems as though Blip is the only network capable of handling “HD” video streams at this point? Won’t be too long before everyone does - or should - support that type of media. Of course, I’m also under the delusion that people will starting consuming more new media on-demand through affinity searches rather than through specific subscriptions.

And I’ll tell you right now, with all of these various networks and embeds and services and… zOMG! What I think the world really needs at this point is a single embed to share on their own terms. That is to say, a Flash embed within which you might be able to embed anything you wish (which isn’t quite the SplashCast model, but close to it). We’re having an absolute blast with our live video efforts - and I hope to have the more interesting moments and interviews archived and pushed out to all these video networks (and on our own site) within a relatively short amount of time.

Yeah, I’ve really been liking live lately. Really.

[tags]tv show, video, video recording[/tags]