Google is showing no signs of slowing down in its release of products. Following Google+ and Cosmic Panda, Google has revamped their embedded playlist player with some new features that will make it easier to share multiple videos with similar content in a webpage or blog environment.
The update allows viewers to navigate within a playlist via thumbnails nested in the lower-half of the embedded player. Here’s how you do it:
First, grab your playlist embed code by going to the “My Videos” section. Select a playlist on the lefthand toolbar and click the “Share” tab.
Your playlist embed code should look something like this:
<object width=”480″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/p/5A9F2A86BA57EFB3?version=3&hl=en_US&fs=1“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/p/5A9F2A86BA57EFB3?version=3&hl=en_US&fs=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”480″ height=”385″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>
Change the “fs=1″ to “version=3″:
<object width=”480″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/p/5A9F2A86BA57EFB3?version=3&hl=en_US&version=3“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/p/5A9F2A86BA57EFB3?version=3&hl=en_US&version=3” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”480″ height=”385″ allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”></embed></object>
and you’ll get:
If you click the bottom second of the video it will expand and show the videos in the playlist right on the player. This allows the viewer to see videos on the playlist without navigating away from the currently playing video or the page that it is embedded on. The red button will collapse the thumbnail menu.
So why are playlists important? Well, if you’re producing several videos that center around one topic, this is a good way to not only organize them but also to make them easily accessible to your audience. Great topics include:
- Customer Testimonials
- Product Demos
- Employee Bios
- Recurring Videos (yearly fundraising, weekly video blogs, etc)
- Broadcast Media (TV Spots, PSAs, etc)
If you have an “Our Staff” page on your website, it would be a great idea to embed your “Employee Bios” playlist on that page. You could also put your “Product Demos” playlist on your “Our Products” page. It may be appropriate to post a playlist on a blog post as well.
If you have any existing playlists already embedded on your site, Google has said that on July 20th existing URLs will automatically trigger the new player, at which point you won’t have to change the embed code to “version=3″ – but you tinkerers will probably want to experiment early.
This update will give more value to embedded playlists, especially for marketers. Tell us how you will use it below.
About Steven Shattuck
