Jilion

This is a big day for us at Jilion!
Today, as promised we let you know what we’ve been working on during the past few months. We hope you’ll like it as much as we do.

After 6 months of exciting work, we are extremely happy to introduce SublimeVideo.net, our HTML5 Video Player as a Service.

Some of you were anticipating that we would distribute SublimeVideo as a ZIP file download.
Well, today we’re offering a much better option – a real-world and practical HTML5 video player solution.

Our goal is simple: We really want you to get “state-of-the-art you can actually use”, instantly, easily and inexpensively.

Let’s face it, for 99% of our potential customers, HTML5 Video could be a real pain to deploy. Why? Because every browser has its own specificities which means you need to hire experts in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 to ensure your HTML5 Video Player works flawlessly in all of them. And that’s not all: To be sure your player does not break and that you always provide the best experience to your audience, you still need to maintain it continuously by following on a daily basis the evolution of numerous browsers and their versions, on various desktop and mobile platforms.
This is just not realistic for the vast majority of web sites willing to enable HTML5 video.

Thanks to SublimeVideo HTML5 Video Player as a Service, none of this is a problem for you anymore: We take care of all that complexity, allowing you to instantly deliver to your audience the best HTML5 video experience possible on the web, worry-free!
That’s the main benefit of SublimeVideo but there’s more:

• Get your own SublimeVideo player up-and-running in seconds.
• Get your SublimeVideo player delivered to your audience globally through our fast, reliable and low-latency Content Delivery Network.
• Welcome to Zero Maintenance: Your SublimeVideo player is always up-to-date.
• Updates including bug-fixes and new platforms support are automatically deployed.
• Updates are near-instantaneous for our global customers base.
• Monitor your players usages in near real-time.
• Integration in your web pages is done in just one-simple-line of embed code that we generate for you.
• Integration can be done by mere mortals, i.e. non-developers.
• There are no integration costs, no deployment costs and no maintenance costs, the usual hidden costs of “free download solutions”.

So what’s next?
What about the pricing and when can you start using SublimeVideo?

First of all, we would like to thank you for all the amazing feedback you sent us in the past few days since we opened our “Notify-Me” form on sublimevideo.net.
After just two tweets, in the first days of a quiet August month, we received thousands of participation requests for our upcoming Beta!

In the next few days, we will start sending the first invitations for the Beta to as many people as possible.
The Beta will be free while it’s on.
During the Beta, we will fine-tune the service, collect your comments, and most importantly, we will work hard to define the best pricing model!

Shaping the right pricing model is going to be a challenging experience for us. We will need your help because we want to do our best to shape a pricing model that can fit a wide range of potential customers, from individuals to large companies.
To address this pricing challenge, we plan to ask Beta testers to answer a quick survey and we will also contact some of you directly. We hope we can collectively find a solid answer to the question “What would you be willing to pay for the value SublimeVideo provides to you?”.

In the mean time, please have a look at our just released sublimevideo.net homepage, as well as our new demo page!

Thanks again,
— the Jilion team

Would you like to be notified when SublimeVideo is released? Are you interested to be part of an early limited beta and give your feedback on the product and the pricing? Visit sublimevideo.net

For the last three months, we have been thinking thoroughly about how to make of SublimeVideo player the most functional, universal, easy-to-deploy-and-maintain HTML5 video solution.

Next month we will reveal all the details and commercial plan of our upcoming SublimeVideo solution. We hope you will love it as much as we do. Frankly, we are super-excited about it!

Once again, thank you so much for your great support and patience. By the way, we promise to communicate more frequently about our progress.

SublimeVideo has a broader goal than just showcasing some nice HTML5 features in a controlled environment like our demo page. We aim at delivering a modern and simple video-embedding solution for web developers that provides the same user experience and uniform UI across browsers.

The first main news of the day is we have just completed the development of the Flash mode of our SublimeVideo player. It is not a separate product, but a necessary component to achieve our ambition to offer you a truly universal video player that works in all browsers.

With SublimeVideo Flash mode, our users will have the warranty that their videos will play seamlessly even in non-HTML5 browsers such as IE 6, 7 or 8 and also in Firefox/Opera when the Ogg Theora video version is not available.

Flash and HTML5 versions look and feel the same

To see the new Flash player in action, we created an additional demo page where SublimeVideo Flash mode is forced for all browsers (including browsers that fully support HTML5 video).

Here are the features of SublimeVideo Flash mode:

• Same sleek UI as the HTML5 player
• Full-window mode (click on the full-window button, or double-click on the video) with draggable controls pane
• Full-screen mode (hold down Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows/Linux) while entering full-window mode)
• While in full-window or full-screen mode, press spacebar to play/pause and Esc to exit full-window/full-screen
• SublimeVideo automatically falls back to Flash in Firefox and Opera to decode H.264 video in case the Ogg Theora version is not provided

Open web standard “purists” who do not care about compatibility with old browsers will be able to completely disable the Flash fallback to provide a pure HTML5 video experience.

The second big news of the day is that we have entirely rewritten our JavaScript code to remove all dependencies to external libraries or frameworks (originally SublimeVideo was written using the Prototype JS framework). This is a big deal, because it means SublimeVideo is now a standalone pure JavaScript library with the benefit that anyone can easily use it along side any version of any other libraries (jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, Dojo, YUI, Ext JS, …) without having to worry about conflicts.

Finally, we received a lot of requests concerning the release date. We really want to make this product right. The fact that you see SublimeVideo working on our demo page doesn’t mean it is fully ready to be released and embedded in any webpage out there. There’s still some work to do. Thank you for your patience, we are doing our best in order the wait will be worth it!

We are working hard on the release of SublimeVideo (no date yet).

We’ve just finished adding support for Firefox and Ogg Theora videos. We figured we’d update the demo page to show it to you.

It should work on Firefox 3.5, but we strongly encourage you to upgrade to the latest version (currently 3.6).

SublimeVideo on Firefox has pretty much all the basic features of the WebKit (Safari/Chrome) version, however there’re some secondary features which couldn’t be implemented because of Firefox limitations.

Here are the features that are currently missing:

1. Sleek Zoom-in/out transitions when entering/leaving full-window mode
2. Playback speed controls (when in full-window mode)
3. Other minor fade-in/out effects to highlight the poster frame and reveal the controls when mouse-hovering over the video

SublimeVideo full-window controls browsers comparison

We are confident that the next release of Firefox (3.7) will include all the necessary improvements that will allow us to implement the missing features.

A note regarding true full-screen mode:
At the moment we couldn’t integrate this directly into our controls as we did for the WebKit Nightly build (by alt-clicking the full-window button), but if you’re using Firefox 3.6 you can enter this mode by right-clicking on the video and choosing “Full Screen” from the contextual menu.

Enjoy.

Today we’d like to show you a pre-release demo of SublimeVideo. It’s an HTML5 video player that will allow you to easily embed videos in any page, blog or site using the latest modern web standards.

Browsers makers are still working on fully supporting the HTML5 video specification, so at the moment SublimeVideo is still in experimental state and only works on a limited number of browsers. But the long term goal is to make it work on all modern browsers.

SublimeVideo will be soon released for free (at least for non-commercial use).

Key Features

• Full-window mode
  This will maximize the video to fit the browser’s window. It can be handy if you still want to access other applications while watching a maximized video in your browser.
  Besides, browsers makers are still working on implementing true fullscreen for HTML5 videos; so full-window is currently the only way to maximize the video on Safari and Chrome.
• Full-screen mode
  Currently only supported in the latest WebKit Nightly Builds, you can activate this mode by ALT-clicking on the full-window button.
• HTML5 video benefits
  No browser plugin, no Flash dependencies!
  You can also jump anywhere in the video without having to wait for it to buffer.

See more features on the SublimeVideo demo page.

The case of Caprices Festival

Jilion and Caprices Festival just launched a very interesting social networking integration of Facebook and MySpace in a music festival website.

Caprices Festival approached us back in October with the goal to be one of the first, if not the first music festival allowing people to influence a great part of the festival’s lineup, by voting for artists willing to enroll in the competition. It’s worth to mention those artists have not been previously selected by the organizers.

Launched on January 15, the service allows, on one hand, MySpace artists to quickly submit their profile to Caprices (via MySpaceID), and on the other hand any Facebook user to vote for them (via Facebook Connect).
As a result 6 “elected” acts per day on 3 stages will play at Caprices next April.

6 first days users base growth coming from Facebook Connect

We are very pleased by the early results:

• In the first 6 days, more than 11’000 Facebook users joined the contest. Previously, Caprices took 3 years to attract ~2500 members on their Facebook group;
• More than 400 artists are participating so far;
• More than 150 MySpace artists have been proposed so far by Facebook users.

Few comparable websites relying only on their own sign-up can record 11?000 users in the first 6 days. Facebook is a “no-brainer” for users to sign-up as it is a very convenient process for someone already having a Facebook account.
A proper integration with a leading social network definitely helps to bootstrap a new service as the incentive always exists for users to propagate new kinds of “cool” actions back on their profile’s news feed.

We’re glad to see the iPhone app we developed for Helvetiq entered the Swiss App Store Top 20 Free apps in less than 24 hours.

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce ourselves and tell you more about what we do.

We recently started Jilion late summer 2009 but our team has actually been working together for several years at the EPFL campus in Switzerland.

Back in 2006, Mehdi and Zeno started the Jime project, rapidly joined by Thibaud and Octave and several other excellent contributors. Jime is a massive project, which is going to be our contribution to solve the current mess of the music industry by providing a complete Internet-based solution to its numerous problems.

Jime will propose a completely pro artists platform and a pure level playing field for all participants of this new value chain model.

Jime is a beautiful project that strongly unites our team. It is still cooking and will be launched …when ready. So no additional teasing till then!

We decided to start Jilion for several reasons:

First of all, we want to stay independent in order to keep a clean focus on what we think Jime should become.

We were asked from time-to-time to work on other projects as we collectively amassed tons of experience in complex back-end development using Ruby on Rails, rich interactive front-ends using JavaScript and web standards, social media platforms interoperability and stylish and effective interface design.

Also, it’s healthy to close the loop more often than your own “big project” allows you, meet and work with people on exciting challenges and generate satisfaction for everybody.

For all these reasons, we are very excited to start Jilion and we’ll continuously aim at delivering our customers with the highest level of geek-excellence and satisfaction possible.

Whether you would like to work with us, discuss a project or anything else, feel free to contact us.

The Jilion Team
— Mehdi, Zeno, Thibaud, Octave