Vidlisting Blog: Web Real Estate Video

Adding Real Estate Shows (RES) to your Vidlisting personal media catalog is exceptionally quick and easy.  You’ll also benefit from the new catalog interface that we want to show off and use alternative media sources such as YouTube and RES if you have real estate video content stored there. For those that are interested in reading about how to add YouTube video, we’ve covered that over on our ForSaleByLocals video platform blog since YouTube has applicability beyond just real estate.

Beyond Real Estate Videos: How To Include RES In Your Personal Media Catalog

Once you’ve opened an existing personal media catalog (or create a new personal media catalog), you simply click on the button labelled “Add YouTube and RES”.

This button will bring you to a short form. You simply cut and paste or type the RES URL of the show that you want to add to the catalog. This is the only required step. Note that for RES we “automagically” retrieve Photo #1 from the show so it isnt necessary to upload a photo.

You can also optionally add up to 2 lines of titles and some text that will be shown in your video icon.  You can also geolocate your show which will allow us to potentially include your property oriented show when others search for real estate in the same area.

Now just hit the send button and you’ll see a representation of your real estate show in your catalog:

It’s that easy.  Once included in your catalog, you can just as quickly do interesting things with your icons that include creating group horizontal and vertical media widgets using real estate videos and Real Estate Shows for use in your blog or website. Up to 5 icons can be selected and included.

We’ve included an example of a functioning widget below and will have instructions in a future blog post on how to create them (hint: click on the media that you want to include and use the “Create Horizontal Video Bar” Button - it takes about 10 seconds)

Since the widget above is live, try clicking on any of the properties in the widget and the click will bring you directly to that real estate show.  Note: you can mix video and RES in these video bars without any issues. As always, contact us with any questions…

Video content uploaded to vidlisting is available immediately after a few minutes of processing. Unlike our competitors, we dont let our approval process get in the way of you and your video. With sites like Youtube apparently on a path to ban online property tours (EDITOR NOTE: info pointed out to be not be representative of YouTube terms of use), a scalable and responsive service for real estate video content will be more important for those that produce such content.

How is how we scale our conversion process with respect to reviews of uploaded user generated content:

- Non-video files are immediately detected:  We have a 100% automated video conversion process with a step that catches files that are not valid videos before any conversion begins. We also have the ability to know when uploaded videos have codecs that we cannot convert or must download in order to convert.

- Your converted video upload is only available by link or widget: Converted video is initially only available to you by direct link,  personal media catalog, or distributable by widget. This will serve most people’s needs in the first hours of an upload. The real danger of a malicious upload is with automated distribution or syndication. This is likely why portals haven’t just taken feeds en masse from user generated listing sites. 

With our system, the video is available immediately but not syndicated until after review. Until review occurs, the only distribution mechanism is by the user cutting and pasting the video widget or link. Syndication to our website or to partner sites cannot occur and therefore any damage done by a maliciously posted will be limited to sites where the user must have direct access.

We don’t believe that you should have to wait hours or days for your videos to convert. Honestly, I wonder how automated the conversion system really is when the wait is that long or how a site can scale with a growing user base if every video must be manually reviewed. 

We think that we have a better and more scalable approach that has reasonable safeguards against maliciously posted user generated content. Do you?  How can we improve?