Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
viewedit.comFrom their terms:
"you retain all of your ownership rights in your content however you hereby grant Vidyard and its affiliates a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable, license to use, reproduce, perform, distribute, and display such content. Furthermore, you grant Vidyard, its affiliates, and sublicensees the right to use your name and/or user name in connection with the content."
It sounds like a typical case of contract-lawyer boilerplate stuffing where nobody in charge read it or cared enough to change it.
Similar to what Facebook, Twitter, etc have done in the past.
Still, they need to fix that if their business model really isn't to resell your screen-shared content.
Hey there, Jon here from the Vidyard team. I can assure the group that the intention was never for Vidyard to do anything with user content other than to provide the service. Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. An update to the Terms of Use for ViewedIt will be rolled out shortly.
what the shit
Hi, I'm Steve, one of the developers on the ViewedIt team. If you have any questions about ViewedIt, we're listening and are happy to answer them. ViewedIt recordings are powered by the chrome screen recording apis - https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/tabCapture for browser tab recording, getUserMedia for screen & webcam, and the MediaRecorder api to record the streams.
As a person receiving the screen recording, do I have the option to opt-out, and not report my viewing metrics back to the creator?
Hey, I'm also a developer on ViewedIt.
As the viewer, you can't opt-out of analytics. The analytics are only identifiable as you (the viewer) if the recorder sends you the video through gmail as ViewedIt will append your email as a query string param to the ViewedIt link. If shared through social media, you'll still send analytics back so that the recorder knows how many views their video got, but you as the viewer won't be identified in those views.
+1. Similarly, as a creator do I have the option of opting out all my viewers of metrics, so that the issue never even comes up for them?
If I'm creating a video, I don't want the people I'm sending it to to feel like I'm getting marketing data from them (assuming I'm not).
Yep, I was thinking that it will make the viewers feel like someone is standing over the shoulder watching.
I just tried it and think its awesome. It's extremely easy to use and works really well. I'd love to use it on a regular basis..... but....
1) The terms of service are kinda scary. If I amass a large library of awesome videos you guys can turn off your servers and walk away like it's no big deal and you guys own the videos I make.
2) It seems as though you are doing everything you can to avoid users from embeding videos and want users to visit viewedit.com instead. Will this change?
(1) may be a showstopper, but (2) is a creative turnoff.
I would think embedding little video snippets in a web page, interspersed with prose, would be the killer presentation use case. Instead, the product promotes itself to center stage, above the content itself.
Is this private or public?
A tip for Windows users who would like something like this for other applications: If you are on Windows 10 you can press Windows+G to open the game-bar in any application. It supports capturing video content.
Edit: This does not bring up a prompt to send the video.
Other than the Chrome icon on the "Get It" button, there's no real indication on the page that this is a Chrome only extension.
I like the design though. Looks pretty slick.
What's the target use case?
One of the makers here, good question. We think there's a number of use cases - customer support (screen cap what they're doing wrong) and sales (personalized sales pitch) being the most obvious for the time being.
Also, good point on the Chrome Extension messaging, will fix.
Could teaching be a market?
For sure. I think there's a great opportunity for teaching/training/product walk-throughs.
We have a couple customers using the full-fledged Vidyard platform for running training courses, excited to see how this screen recording tech gets adopted by them!
I thought about something similar for interface testing, bug report and feedback. Linked with issue tracking tools.
I think even UI/UX review would be good. Like looking at things that pop up on Show HN and doing a short video covering usability and design of the thing.
Seems to me that it would be easier to cover UI/UX in video format than screenshots and pictures. I'm by no means an expert in that area though.
During the beta I've been using it for showing off new UI/UX and features in Github pull requests as well as getting support to attach screen caps of software issues to their tickets. Might get QA to start using it to document defects as well. Works great.
This sounds nice:
Is ViewedIt really free?
Yes! We believe in the power of video creation and storytelling and want to give it to everyone.
The product is built by Vidyard, so we make money on the enterprise platform. The use of ViewedIt will always be free. I talked about this a little more here: https://medium.com/@devongall/https-medium-com-devongall-the...
Nice tool, thank you! An extension to post on Youtube directly will be great!
Thx for the feedback - consider it on the roadmap!
This is great! Now I won't have to write paragraphs explaining design decisions to my clients.
That single click to gmail is bae.
Looks great!
- Can I download the video?
- Can I automatically share it on youtube?
- Some basic editing functionality would be awesome.
Those are features that we may offer at some point.
ViewedIt runs on Vidyard's platform which supports all those features for paying accounts.
Looks very promising! Are there limitations on the length of recordings?
Yes, length is limited to 1 hour unfortunately. Hoping to extend this in the future, but right now for performance reasons we restrict it a bit.
Where are the videos stored? What does a user need to view a video?
Videos are stored in S3, and then syndicated to our CDNs around the world. The player is HTML5, with a flash fallback, so users shouldn't need anything special to watch.
As a sysadmin/IT person, this looks pretty helpful in making user training pretty easy.
The user tracking would help with ensuring that our userbase actually watched our policy videos too. Love it.
Will there be a way to list existing recordings & delete them ?
One day soon we hope to add a library - this is where you'd find features like this!
I was a beta tester for this and it's pretty great for sharing screen caps of UX issues in our software and showing off new features in Github pull requests.
I thought the name was ViewEdit, as for me that seems to be the more likely parse of a product name (verb verb vs. past-verb noun.) Intentional pun?
nice work. it solves our sales outreach hacks
Cool! We're working on some other sales productivity tools alongside this - would love to hear what you guys have been doing. I'm devon [at] vidyard [dot] com.
hi, this may be exactly what I am looking for if ... I don't want to send the video via email, I want to save it in one of the usual formats to my disc, is this supported? Right now your extension returns "Error 503 Connection timed out", I am sure it will be fine shortly, I just wanted to ask.
Hi - sorry to hear you've hit some difficulties! support[at]viewedit[dot]com should definitely be able to help!
At this point, download isn't supported. It's something we may do in the future, but for now the hope is that the built in sharing makes download obsolete. Would love to hear areas where DL is important - feedback[at]viewedit[dot]com
Thanks!
> but for now the hope is that the built in sharing makes download obsolete. Would love to hear areas where DL is important
Just in general: Murphy's law. At the worst possible time, the ISP will be down, the wifi adapter will drop its connection, you'll exceed your data plan, or you'll be at the customer's place who's weird about outside machines on their network.
"Stuff happens". More options are always better, even if you hope you never have to use them.
When you apply to YC they ask for an unlisted YouTube video :)
ffmpeg might be helpful in your use case: ffmpeg.exe ‐f gdigrab ‐i desktop ‐framerate 30 ‐vcodec libx264 ‐preset ultrafast new‐output‐video‐file.mkv
All I am getting is a "waiting" page.
No mention of supported platforms?