Today we’ve finished and released a new feature on the Best Tech Videos site called “video features”. This is a really simple thing, but it opens us many new areas to explore online video market.

Video features is a small set of icons on our video thumbnails which tells you what kind of video this is. At this moment there are 6 possible features which could be combined in a different ways:

• Free Video - Video is free for view
• Free downloads - Video is available for download
• Free signup - You’ll need to register for free on the video site
• Pay per view - You’ll need or be able to pay to view this video to watch
• Pay per download - You’ll need or be able to pay for this video to download
• Signup payment - You’ll need or be able to buy a subscription on the video site

By introducing these features we’ll be able to start posting really interesting videos we weren’t able to post before because they are not free (we didn’t want to post videos w/o telling people that they could be asked to pay). So, really soon we’ll post really nice videos from peepcode and other authors and thanks to “video features” you’ll be able to decide if you want to watch them or not.

Today we’ve got 2008 great tech videos in our collection and it is growing really fast! Using this occasion I’d like to say a few words about our latest changes and some upcoming ones:

• We’ve really improved our search - now it is better than ever (fast and with awesome results quality/relevance).
• We’ve cleaned up some old and broken video links and now going to automate this process so you’ll have the best videos w/o any problems with stale links.
• We’ve started regular postings from many sites - each day we have more great videos here!
• Gategories/tags system is going to be changed drastically so it’ll be even easier to find great content
• Advanced search (by categories, tags, levels, etc) will be added soon
• Since we’ve started the project, there were many awesome videos out there, but we weren’t able to share them here because they are not free. Now we’re going to add such a feature here - you’ll be able to watch commercial videos (like peepcode screencasts) here, but of course, we’ll mark them appropriately to let our users decide what they want to watch.

Stay tuned and we promise - you’ll love our new features and new content!

As many of our users may have noticed last week we were publishing much more videos on the site. With this postings increase we’ve introduced a set of new video series on the site you may want to watch:

• Ruby Plus (Ruby, Ruby on Rails)
• sd.rb podcast (Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Web Services)
• Adobe Photoshop Quicktips (Design, Photoshop)
• dnrTV (.NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Studio)
• InfoQ (Videos about everything related to software development)
• Learn Excel with MrExcel (Microsoft Excel)
• DimeCasts.NET (.NET Framework, C#, ASP.NET, Visual Studio)
• WDTV (Design, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop)
• GitCasts (git source control system)
• Becoming a Jedi (Jetbrains ReSharper)

Check out these series - they are really interesting!

P.S. If you feel overwhelmed by such a big number of new items in our main RSS feed, you can signup/login anytime and create your own RSS feed to make sure you’ll see only most interesting (for you) content in your RSS reader.

Today Best Tech Videos team released new search engine on the site. Now our search results became much better and we hope our users would love this new improvement.

Stay tuned! This week we’re going to release an advanced search functionality which would make searches even more powerful.

Hello, all! Happy New Year!

It’s been a while since we’ve rolled out some interesting features on BTV and I think it’s time to do it. So, today we’ve rolled out new minor release of BTV site with quite a few changes, which were annoying us and our users. Here is some short summary:

• Custom user feeds are fixed now (yes - shame on us - they were broken). They’re updated live now so sign up, create your own feed and watch new videos only on topics you like!
• Video posting made a bit simpler now - permalinks are not required anymore, few bugs in posting were fixed, tags are made unique automagically and some other interesting stuff was added.
• We’ve added ‘rippers’ feature - it you’re site owner and would like your videos to be posted on BTV but don’t like an idea of going and posting your videos manually, ping us (in comments or by email) and we’ll give you an ability to post your videos on our site in one click - ripper code will take all required info and links from your site automatically!
• Many small problems with feed manager, custom feeds and video posting were fixed.

So, stay tuned and let’s make BTV better - we’re waiting for your comments!

From now on main BTV feed will be mixed with BTV blog feed so all subscribers would be able to read all news just along with new videos announcements.

Many thanks to Yahoo for their great Yahoo Pipes service!

Yes! We did it! Just before I went to bed at 3:40AM, heh, I noticed, that someone submitted new video to BTV. I’ve approved it instantly and then noticed a following information in the top part of the site: “We have 1000 videos / 569+ hours of high-quality content!” So, we broke trough 1k videos barrier! Let’s do 2k videos before the end of this year, what do you think?

Thanks to all our users for their contributions and support! Stay with us and we’ll try to give you more features really soon.

Do you like to eat tasty food? Do you like to cook? Or, maybe, your wife, girlfriend or mother likes to cook? Then you definitely need to take a look at new site started by the team of creators of the “Best Tech Videos”. Welcome to the “Best Cooking Videos” site! Here you can find tons of high-quality videos about cooking, free lessons from professional chefs, interviews and much more. Really soon we’ll release more features like favorite videos bookmarking, videos filtering and even posting your own videos!

Join us today - subscribe to our RSS feed or simply visit us from time to time to get more interesting information on cooking!

After the new site engine release many people asked us, how they can use new site now if they used to simply browse old site from start page looking for new videos and not using our RSS feeds. They missed old blog-like view with new videos added to the top of the main page.

Today we released new version of the site where you can use “Recent Videos” link on the top of the pages and browse all videos page by page.

If you want us to add something else to the site or change something, just ask and we’ll try to do what we can.

We’re really glad to see, that our users just started posting their videos on our service. First user who submitted his (her?) videos is  fets07 from Belgium. His posted videos could be found here and you can subscribe to this user submissions here.

If you want to post you own videos or videos you’ve found on the Net, just signup and use “Post New Video” link on the top bar.

Thanks to all our users for support.