Some time ago we took a look at VP Factory, an app that makes it a synch to manage your videos, embeds and create a customized video player, among other things. Since that review, the VP Factory team has been hard at work adding features and making improvements.
So what new features and improvements does VP Factory bring to the table now? HTML5 players, modules for ads and analytics and more. Read on for more info. and to see why you should give this app a shot.
Manage, Publish and Embed Videos with VP Factory
VP Factory Review
If you missed our first review of VP Factory, be sure to give it a read for our first look at this great app – Manage, Publish and Embed Videos with VP Factory.
VP Factory was among our 10 favorite HTML5 video players as well, so if you’re looking for HTML5 embedding capabilities, VP Factory is an app you should definitely be checking out.
New Features
Our last review gave VP Factory an 8/10 rating and mentioned a few areas we felt could be improved, namely pricing plan options and more customization options were the areas we felt were lacking. Has the VP Factory team come through with their new features and improvements? Let’s find out.
Several of these features are still in beta and may not be available to all users just yet.
Pricing
To start, VP Factory now has offers 30,000 player views, social sharing, 500 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth for the Free plan. This is a huge improvement since our first review, having increased player views by three times (from 10K to 30K), enabling social sharing and now offering video hosting space and bandwidth which wasn’t offered before unless a paid plan was selected.
Pricing
With VP Factory, even the free plan is ad free! In addition to that, no credit card is required for signup.
Social sharing enables you to share to Twitter, Facebook and Myspace from the video player, of course in addition to the regular embedding options. If you need more features and capabilities, $9 per month is a pretty good deal considering everything VP Factory enables you to do, all under one roof. If you need more, custom options are available as well.
External Playlists
While the regular video player is quite fantastic, sites that are heavy on videos and video playlists will probably want to take advantage of the new external playlists. This is a feature that would
External Playlists
External playlists are created using PHP and accessing VP Factory’s API. The code is pretty straight forward (example) although it will be important for VP Factory to further refine this into a more user friendly way to be used that doesn’t necessarily require knowledge of PHP or JavaScript. As the feature is still technically in beta, I would imagine this feature will be further refined into the main app for users to display and customize their external playlists.
Ads and Analytics Module
If you need to take your videos to the commercial level, you’ll likely want to get the Ads and Analytics modules. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to directly test these modules at the time of writing this review, but once I do I’ll be sure to update this post with screenshots and further details.
The Ads and Analytics modules offer a whole host of features that’ll help you get the most from your ads and videos.
Analytics Module
Graphical view by day, week, month for:
- Total Views
- Visitors
- Viewer Location
- Average Time
- Percent Completed
- Interest Zones
- Devices
- Unique Visitors
Ads Module
Ads formats:
- Image
- Text
- Image + text
- SWF
- Video
- RSS
Configure Ad by:
- Position
- Timing: Custom (Start- Duration), PreRoll, MidRoll, PostRoll
- Opacity
While the ads modules is certainly focused towards ads within your videos, you could also use it in other ways such as adding comments within a video.
HTML5 Player
Although the lower plans don’t offer the HTML5 video player, it is available if you need it. For those that need iPhone, iPad or Android compatibility, you can get the HTML5 module with a promo code. The HTML5 module is still technically in beta-testing but it will progressively become available to more users.
HTML5 Module
Once the HTML5 module is activated, your players will auto-detect your visitor’s device and play the appropriate video.
If you upload a video to VP Factory that isn’t already HTML5 ready, you can choose to encode the video for iPhone/iPad playback. The video will be encoded to mp4 and ogv.
Encode for iPhone/iPad
If you want all your videos to be iPhone/iPad capable, simply visit your account settings page and select Encode for “Make all my videos iPhone/iPad compatible”.
Final Thoughts
VP Factory is as easy as ever to use and really takes a lot of the work out of managing your video collection while enabling you to create custom video player skins, playlists and more. I really don’t know of any other web app that offers anything similar, let alone anything capable of competing with what VP Factory is offering.
The bumped up Free plan is much more enticing to those getting started and those who want to give VP Factory a test run. In fact, with these new improvements and features, I’ll be setting up a few of my clients with VP Factory to make things a little easier.
While the HTML5, Ads and Analytics modules are still technically in beta-testing, they’re very promising. As HTML5 is a big draw right now though, I’d love to see it rolled out across all price plans once it leaves beta. This will definitely help those in search of a quality HTML5 video player to choose VP Factory.
If you haven’t read our initial review of VP Factory, be sure to give that a look and let us know what you think of the web app via comment below.
Our last rating was 8/10 and I definitely think VP Factory deserves a 9/10 with these new improvements and features. Once the features leave beta, depending on their ease of use and full implementation, this app may well be deserving of a 10/10 rating.