24.com launches video sharing site Play

Published by Charl Norman on Jan 14th, 2008, 1 Comment

24.com, the digital arm of South African media giant Media24, has expanded it’s social networking portfolio with the launch of their video sharing service, PLAY. Earlier in the year 24.com launched Laaik.it – their content bookmarking service – which was their debut in social media market. Elan Lohmann – head of social media at 24 – informed me of PLAY a few months back to help beta test the new video sharing application.

Play has been created to enable the 24 blogging community to seamlessly create and post video content to their blogs. Although any member of the public can upload, view and discuss videos on the site with your 24.com login. Play has all the usual characteristics of a video sharing service such as ‘Flavas’ which is your content channels and your own personal profile showcasing your uploaded and bookmarked videos (Favs). 24.com have also built their own flash video player featuring media embedding functionality, full screen viewing, content rating and discovery of other videos after the clip has finished playing.

Play has numerous content channels each with their own rss feed for keeping tabs on new videos through your reader. Some of the more popular channels (Flavas) are Sport, Pets, Geek and Cars.

Conclusion

Not a bad effort for a first try keeping in mind the service is dedicated to the 24.com bloggers. The service wasn’t launched aimed at taking out the likes of Zoopy or MyVideo just yet. Although with their traffic volumes they could become the biggest video sharing site in SA over night.

The only small issue I noted was bad SEO on some pages – If you surf through the site you will see each page has the same title tag “Play – powered by 24.com” – they should automatically set the title of the page the same as the title of the video or channel page your viewing. This will help with keyword indexing for Google, Yahoo or even their own search engine, 24.

Screen shot

Viewing a video

Visit Play.24.com

http://goguide.co.za Rob

It’s odd, why are all the new 24 sites – rushed, cheep knock offs? They need to spend more time on usability and inspire their designers better.

By the way Charl, got a new site up (Went up this week) – http://www.goguide.co.za. Still in serious beta and allot of changes and bug fixes on the way.

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