After taking cues from YouTube, it looks like the boys and girls at Google have decided to update the Blogger video player in order to make it user friendly.
We also introduced a new video player that’s based on the YouTube player. The new Blogger video player allows full-screen viewing — now visitors can watch videos that you published on your blog in full-screen mode. The new player also features a better user interface, such as animated seekbar (the red bar along the bottom of the video) and bigger buttons. You can also right-click on the player to see more information about the video, such as playback performance (“Show Video Info”) or network speed (“Take Speed Test”). Note that despite the new video player, the videos you upload to Blogger are still only visible on your blog, not on YouTube. (Blogger Buzz)
While the video service is still not HTML5 complient, the UI is much more professional than when they first introduced video uploading for Blogspot users in 2007.
Even though the new interface is no VideoPress killer (sorry Google!), its free price tag coupled with a few extra features could convince a few WordPress fans to come back to Blogger.
Although the Blogger team did us all a favor by dropping the orange B logo (which made the videos look tacky), they seem to have left out the ability to embed the video elsewhere or even share the videos upon Twitter, Google Buzz and Facebook.
It will be interesting to see whether Google ties other services within the new video player (such as analytics, ratings and advertising), as well as making it viewable for us iPhone lovers (hint, hint!).
Either way this feature should help Blogger appeal to blogspot probloggers around the web, as well as convince a few WordPress lovers to migrate back to BlogSpot (this author included).
About time. I’ve been having a feeling that Blogger is actually slacking a bit too much. Thank god they finally did some relevant improvements.