On-site credit card processing. If a potential customer has to go out, create a PayPal or other account, enter all their info, authorize the purchase and generally jump through hoops to get your product you may have lost them already. The credit card processing should be on site (secure of course), easy to use and International.

Affiliate program. My greatest evangelists are the users who already have the product and think it is awesome! Why not allow them to help sell the product and give them a kick back of each sale they make?

E-Mail marketing. Getting the customer is one step, retaining them is another. It is important to be able to communicate with everyone as to why their membership is valuable and what they are getting out of it. It is also important to allow the members to opt-out of said e-mails if they want to. The initial sale is just part of the process, keeping them is the other part.

Coupons. If I want to have a sale on the product, or give out coupons to sites that can offer a discount if they use code ‘PROMO1′ for example, I should be able to do that too! It is a great tool for cross-promotion of my content and their content.

Detailed reporting. I need to be able to see what is working and what isn’t working. What do the sales look like. Where are they coming from? How much am I making and how much has to go back out to affiliates?

Support. Pre-sales, installation and maintenance are all important. Getting the plugin to do exactly what you want will probably require a few hoops you’ll need to jump through, so you’ll probably find yourself leaning on the support team a lot more than expected.

So what did we do in the end? When it was all said and done I actually purchased three plugins to get just the right ones to fit our needs: Suma Plugin, Wishlist Member and Digital Access Pass. The final plugin we went with was Digital Access Pass. Why? Because it does nearly everything on my features list and no other plugin comes even close!

When I originally wrote the article Digital Access Pass or DAP didn’t have a key feature which was on-site credit card processing. They now support on-site processing through Authorize.net or PayPay Payments Pro. We use Authorize.net and this is nice because I have full control over the merchant and what will be done. On the customers credit/debit card statement they won’t see ‘PayPal’ but rather ‘Spacevidcast.com’. It looks like a complete and total solution. Wishlist Member still to this day doesn’t support this feature, although their support department originally told me they did. Lame.

In addition DAP already had almost all of the other features I needed. The products and drip content are quite powerful. Far more powerful than Wishlist Member.  Suma doesn’t even have the ability to do drip products or one-off sales. E-mail marketing was already built in. Affiliates are built in and scary powerful. Issues I wouldn’t have even thought of were in place allowing the sales to be properly matched to a user no matter the scenario (check it out on their site, it is quite powerful). I have detailed reporting on what is happening with my account as soon as I log in to the admin dashboard. It was almost everything I needed.

One thing DAP is missing are coupons. I believe they are working on that though as I have seen rumblings of that on the blog.

It is worth pointing out that I tried all three. Suma was a close second. It had on-site credit card processing, support was simply amazing and the product worked well. The big problem with Suma was that it was only a recurring subscription product. It doesn’t do drip products or marketing, it doesn’t do e-mail campaigns, it doesn’t do affiliate programs and while you can hack in coupons it really doesn’t do them like you would expect.

The big plugin in the industry is Wishlist Member and going in to this project I thought it would be the product I would end up with. Boy was I wrong. Other people rant and rave about their support, but in my experience I found them to be the slowest in responding, when they did respond the answer was wrong and even after I asked for a refund I don’t think I ever got it. The product does drip products / marketing very, very poorly. Worst of all you have to go off-site, create an account with a third party and hope you don’t lose your customer in the process. No on-site credit card processing (no matter what their support team says). Wishlist does a great job of marketing themselves, but maybe if they spent a little less time making videos and a little more time adding features to keep up with DAP we would have gone down that road for Spacevidcast instead.

After a week long trial with each the clear winner was DAP. It is an evolving product and even after we launched there were new updates and great new revisions to the code. I know Suma is working on a v3 beta as well. I don’t think Wishlist Member has anything in the pipe, maybe a new video they are working on? If you’re looking for a new Wordpress membership plugin check out Digital Access Pass. Don’t get sucked in by flashy marketing, really look at the products. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion I did that DAP is hands down the best Wordpress Membership plugin on the Internet today.

If you want to see how we used this plugin in production hit up http://www.spacevidcast.com/epic and while you’re there… Maybe buy an epic subscription!

Today Google announced the Nexus One which will work on T-Mobile and soon Verizon. While you can get voice and EDGE access on AT&T there is no subsidized price and no 3G access for AT&T users. All the cool phones are going to Verizon and T-Mobile!

While all cell phone carriers are terrible, AT&T has some serious issues on the coasts where user density is highest. I was recently in California and needed to browse the web on my iPhone. Let me tell you what wasn’t working. Oh sure, I had full bars but there was no bandwidth to be had. It was the most painful experience I have ever had on a mobile device. So painful that I went to a Verizon store and purchased a MiFi so I could have working WiFi access. I actually kept that MiFi (a device that AT&T also does not carry) and we use it for remote Spacevidcast shoots at KSC and Space View Park. You can bet that many users on the coasts are with AT&T because they want the cool phone. But what happens when that cool phone is no longer locked to AT&T or worse yet not even available on AT&T?

I think 2010 will be the year that users flee AT&T en masse for other providers. They have been riding off the iPhone success for too long and not been able to keep up with demand. In the end I think the iPhone will have ended up hurting AT&T more than helping them. They now have a reputation that is soiled and it will take a miracle or two to put them back on top.

I’m considering dumping AT&T for a T-Mobile Nexus One. I’m concerned about T-Mobiles terrible 3G maps though. What do you think? I already have a AT&T account and a Verizon account… Maybe adding T-Mobile isn’t a bad idea. I do utilize each network quite a bit as I am a bleeding edge adopter. I used to have a Sprint account, but, well they can’t seem to do anything right anymore.

Comments?

I also have some shots of the gear. This is the old ProjectMix I/O and the new Fast Track Ultra next to each other:

As always comments are welcome below. I like to start each year with a bang! All new graphics, all new set, all new everything! The show itself will be the same Spacevidcast you love, just better. This year we didn’t have the long break between seasons that we had last year, so I’m just not sure how much we can get done. Of course actually being on-air is more important than graphics, so we won’t miss this next week, but it is always nice to make a well produced show.

Thoughts?

One of the things that I *hate* with the current set is that it looks so news like. We’re behind a table talking at you, not with you. Completely wrong format for this show. The community is just as much a part of the show as we are. I want it to be more informal, more fun, less news like.

My thought was that we would get a couch and a chair. I would sit in the chair and Cariann would sit in the couch. In front of us maybe a coffee table where we would put our computers and possibly a drink (I’ll take a Hendrick’s and tonic with a cucumber, thank you). To do this right I would need 3 HD cameras (problem) and would probably stop putting the guest on the plasma monitor and only have them full screen and in the double box. Cariann and I went shopping and after searching for a while determined we may want to just do two chairs and two side tables. Here’s an interesting option from Ikea:

And the side tables would be so we have something to put our computers on. Something like one of these:

OK, well the red is a bit out there and we would not do that if we got orange chairs. These also come in white.

I still have a HUGE issue with the background. Cafn8ed came up with a nifty idea of some white foam and the possibility to cover it with a graphic of sorts. I go back and forth on that one. Could do some cool things with lights, but as I think about it more and more I fear it will just end up being bland without any kick. Maybe that’s OK. Like I said, back and forth. I could also take the current HDTV and put it back behind us with a Spacevidcast animation of sorts. No idea what to do back there that won’t look cheap and cheesy while at the same time not spending a lot of money. The white sheet really doesn’t work well, just looks like a giant white bedsheet. We could go back to black and then shine something on that to give it some color. Orange chairs and orange lights on the background may look sorta cool.

Of course I fell in love with something we can’t afford. I really like these chairs, but they are $3,500 each. At that price I would get two new HD cameras rather than chairs! But they sure would look cool!

What do you guys think? Stick with the news like desk? Make it more informal and conversational? I like the general idea of what Ashton did in the video below. Nice chair, nice couch, table and interesting background (although the background needs some love still). What do you think?

There are a few key things I think a membership plugin for Wordpress should include:

• Payment processing should have the option of being on-site and not via stupid PayPal subscription buttons. It is far easier to get and keep a sale if the entire sales process is taken care of directly on the site. If the user has to sign up for a PayPal account or jump through any hoops at all, you have probably lost them. They already trust you, why send them away to another site for payment that they may not trust? In addition, not all areas of the world are able to create PayPal accounts. To this end, using PayPal Payments Pro which is their API allowing for on-site credit card processing is ideal. This does require the installation of an SSL certificate, but for anyone *serious* about a membership site this should be done anyhow (do you really want them to send their username and password in clear-text?)
• Free and premium content should be easy to manage. In the case of Spacevidcast we give most of the content away for free but keep back some of the added stuff like post shows for epic subscribers. Rather than having to remember silly short codes, or double enter my data in the post and excerpt section I should have multiple ways to protect my data. If I want to have everything above the ‘more’ tag be free and everything below be paid, that should be allowed. If I want to have only the excerpt be free and the main content be paid, that should be allowed. If I want to use a short code and protect just part of the post, that should be allowed. The plugin should not assume that one method is the best method for protecting content.
• Coupons and promotions. From time to time I may want to run a sale. The plugin should allow me to say something like ‘20% off your first 3 months’ or ‘$10.00 off a yearly membership’. This also allows me to track where the sales are coming from. If I want to give all NASASpaceFlight.com L2 members a 25% discount to epic then I would just give them a specific code to use, which I would then run a report against to see how successful that campaign is.
• Affiliate program. The best people to help sell epic are those in the Spacevidcast community. If I have a member that helps bring in 10 other epic subscribers, then frankly they should get free access for a duration of time. Affiliates get a kickback of sorts to offset the cost of their own membership.
• Drip content. I personally won’t use this and will allow every epic subscriber full access to the entire catalog of content for as long as they are a member, but it should be an option for those who want to use it.
• Recurring memberships as well as single payments. If someone wants to buy access to just one article rather than pay for a full recurring membership, they should be allowed. If they pay for a membership for 60 days and then stop, they should always have access to the 60 days worth of content that they paid for and nothing else. I should also be able to shut that all off so if you no longer pay, you no longer have access.
• Full bill and receipts on the site itself. I don’t want to send my community to a third party for my CC processing, nor do I want to send them there to get their payment history, receipts, etc. The ability to quickly and easily cancel their membership should also be on the site itself, not via a third party.
• E-mail marketing. I want to keep my epic members up to date with the content that they are privy to, in order to help show the value of epic. Since the epic content will be mixed with free content, it may be hard at times to understand exactly what they are getting. Weekly e-mail campaigns (with the option to opt-out) for members should be built in or at least it should tie to another WP plugin that allows me to do this. The advantage of using a different plugin is that I can also have non-subscribers get mail messages to showing the updates on the site as well as show what they are missing out on by not subscribing to epic.
• Detailed user reports. Who bought what, when. Revenue shifts. What coupon is working best. Who is the best affiliate, etc.
• I should be able to assign memberships to users. If I want to bypass the purchase system and give a membership to someone (my mom for example) I should be able to do that and have it tracked in the system as a subscriber, not just a regular Wordpress user.
• There should be multiple tiers of access. Silver, Gold and Platinum for example. Each tier could have a different amount of information, so a silver subscriber gets some of the content whereas a gold subscriber gets all of it.
• Access to all restricted content via an RSS feed specific for that user. When they are a paying member their RSS feed works showing all available content. When they stop paying the RSS feed stops working or reverts to the public feed with only partial information. Simply placing a ‘you need a subscription’ in the public RSS feed isn’t good enough, paying members should be able to see the content whenever and wherever they are, including their RSS reader.

Those are a lot of requirements. We can break that in to two sections. The first is credit card processing and account management. The second is marketing and user retention. Both are equally important but unfortunately not one of the above plugins does both.

I narrowed my search down to both Suma Plugin and Wishlist Member. I purchased both and have been playing with them. Wishlist Member has a ton of features allowing me to really advertise the system and retain members. It has a ton of options for how I will display my content, who I will display it to and when it will be displayed. I have marketing options after the fact so I can send out e-mail blasts to all of my users. The problem is that their credit card processing, which is very important, is sub par. Want to integrate with PayPal? Sure, create a PayPal button, send users to that site, have them create an account, enter their details and then they will get access to your content. If a user wants to unsubscribe that is all taken care of on the PayPal site. The moment I send them over to PayPal I already have the potential to lose them, which means from the beginning this plugin has failed. Too bad because the rest of the plugin is quite powerful. They even allow me to use other merchants, but in all cases I have to do the card processing on a different site which is a huge no-no when it comes to a real solution.

Suma Plugin is the exact opposite of Wishlist Member. This plugin does one thing and it does it extremely well… Process credit cards and give users access to your content via their subscription level. Anything beyond this and it falls flat on its face. Want to do coupon codes? Nope. Want to have affiliate marketing? Nope. E-Mail newsletters to members? Nope. Can I at least drip content to users over time so when they subscribe they don’t just get the whole library? Nah, you can’t do that either. All you can do is process a credit card on your site. They got the user from the beginning by allowing a very simple and straight forward way to purchase a membership without ever having to leave the site. They also help the member with their subscription by giving them the billing history and ability to cancel right on the site. But that’s about as far as the plugin goes.

In an ideal world the developers of Wishlist and Suma would get together and merge their products. That would allow for a very powerful solution where the card processing is done one site, the member management remains on site, and all the cool marketing and retention features would be available to keep the subscribers and get new ones. Unfortunately today it looks like the developers are either in the card processing camp or the marketing camp but not both. So what will I end up using for Spacevidcast epic? I have no idea yet. Suma 3.0 looks promising, but frankly I need/want a solution that does it all. Maybe I should just get going with one of the plugins until Spacevidcast has enough cash to get a programmer to develop the ultimate plugin, then sell that to other users who are in the same camp as we are. Or maybe one of the plugins will develop the other half of the solution that they are missing today by then.

Do you know of a plugin that does both and works with Wordpress? Think I’m crazy and should be going about this a completely different way? Leave your comments below!

I’m trying to give the Spacevidcast site a badly needed revision. The site itself is getting very cluttered in the main navigation and I could use some more room in the video window. Rather than make you click on a video from the homepage to start viewing I wanted to allow you to watch the video right from there. So fewer clicks, cleaner code, better navigation and more room were a few of my goals. I do have a beta available which you can see by going to http://beta.spacevidcast.com (note that not all pages work, right now I’m only focused on the homepage). Generally speaking most users don’t seem to like the really large format video. I would like to know if you like it or not and if not, would you prefer that I stick with a theme much closer to the current site design?

Remember that this is a beta site. Nearly all the features are there they just don’t all work correctly. In your opinion is this site easier or harder than the old site? Also note that the site is fluid, so you’ll see changes in real-time on the beta site as I work on it. Your constructive feedback (and details as to why you think what you’re thinking) would be greatly appreciated.

I would also like to know… What do you think Spacevidcast is? Who are we, what do we do and why are we here? Just checking to see how scattered that answer will be.

Thanks everyone for your time and comments in advance!

Since we installed the dish in spring we had never needed to deal with snow before. With the dish as you see it in the video I had 51% signal, which I thought was pretty good for having the dish covered that much. Alas, 51% is not enough for an image and I ended up with 0% image quality. I spend around 15 minutes shoveling off the dish (and 45 minutes trying to get dry again) to get the signal back up to 95% with 100% image quality. w00t! Of course now NASA is switching satellites on January 16th, which means I’ll need to figure out how to rotate that dish with all the snow. I’ll probably need to give our great friend PSB Satellite a call to help and make sure that who area is clear of as much snow as possible before hand. That won’t be fun because that is super-compacted, super-wet snow.

Exciting day for me and I think for all Spacevidcasters out there! I have wanted to get a premium account with Ustream.tv (watershed) or LiveStream.com but simply could not afford it on Spacevidcast’s budget of $0.00. Earlier this month LiveStream announced a contest to win a free premium account (I assume the small one). The contest was simple: using LiveStream’s new channel design features, create a new channel look that would wow the judges. I had a couple of weeks to make this happen, but as usual waited until the 11th hour and at the last minute submitted something. I actually liked what we submitted but had no idea if it would actually make it. The contest ended on December 14th and then… nothing. Not a peep.

Earlier today I got an e-mail from LiveStream that said,

“Nice work. Out of hundreds of page designs, yours was one of the ten best. Voting starts tonight and ends Monday, Dec 28th at 11:30 pm. Your Channel will be featured as a finalist in our next newsletter as well as on the Livestream website. Good luck.”

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet! I actually had no idea this was a two stage process, but at least we passed the first stage. I just figured they would pick a bunch of designs and go from there. Now we need to win stage 2! Later tonight LiveStream will post the content on their website where users can vote (I assume there will be a blog entry). I would be greatly appreciative if you would vote for the Spacevidcast design to help me get in with a premium account as a great way to start 2010.

Why should you care? Because a LiveStream premium account can have all those annoying ads removed! That’s right, no more pre-rolls, no more overlays! I can opt to add them back in if I want to make some cash for SVC, but this is a fantastic way to get epic subscribers a channel without any ads!

Now I just need ToDoCast.tv to have a similar contest so I can win a free satellite broadcasting setup and free satellite air time. That would be truly awesome!

What a great way to end 2009!

Wow I sound so angry at the end. I think I was going for dramatic and just failed. But really Simon? “Follow us on the Twitterz!!!11!!” Um, k. For a real kick, check out the @simonmalls twitter account. No idea if that is them or not, but HA! Of course if they were trying to advertise the @southdalemall twitter account, I think the 9 followers they have shows an epic fail on their part.

Seriously, Simon… Call my cell! 612-568-0852. Or, you can follow me on Twitter too!  @bencredible See what I did there? Gave you all the information you needed all in one place without having to dig for it.

Don’t try and simply put a traditional TV show on the web
I wrote a long and detailed post on this here. Just remember who your audience is and more specifically when and where they will be watching your show. In many cases a lot of your viewers will be watching at work, so try and keep your shows short and under 5 minutes. This also makes it easier to distribute as you don’t have to worry about YouTube’s 10 minute limit. If you’re a REALLY HUGE provider you can subscribe for a YouTube partner channel to circumvent said limit, but it is not terribly easy to get in to this program. I do happen to have an in, so if your show needs help here, contact me.

Stick with progressive video
A traditional television signal is 480 interlaced lines of resolution. This is fine because that is what the TV sets are designed to display. A typical computer monitor is 768 progressive lines of resolution or HD. Remember this when creating your show! Avoid using SD cameras and specifically interlaced content. Stick with 480p and 720p to avoid interlaced artifacting. 1080i will end up being more like 540p by the time it hits the web, so skip that painful step and only use cameras that support progressive video. By following this simple step you’ll save time, money and frustration in trying to get your show online and looking good! Below is an old video I produced  back in 2007 that explains why this is important:

Video is 80% audio
You can have the best video show in the world, but if your audio is garbage then you have nothing. People will forgive bad video, but they won’t forgive bad audio. Over spend on audio, under spend on video. To be a true video geek you must be an audio geek first and foremost. I can’t stress enough how important not only the speaking audio is, but any music or sound effects used. Audio can completely and totally change a show from something painful to something epic and awesome.

Don’t try and chroma key, you’ll suck at it
Do you know why film uses a blue screen and video uses a green screen? Do you know the difference between 4:4:4 sampling, 4:2:2 sampling and 4:2:0 sampling? Do you know what backspill is? Do you know what a nodal compositor is? If you answered no to any of these questions then you’re not going to get a good chroma key when you try and make your video. A bad key can take away from the video and distract from the information at hand. It is time consuming and unless you can do it right looks like bad community access TV. You’ll be tempted to do a chroma key because you’ll think virtual sets are cool or you want to show off how advanced you are. Avoid the temptation! If you think you have what it takes to do a good chroma key, watch the video below. If you have that gear and can pull it off, go for it.

Time to market matters
Once you have shot, produced and edited your show… Well, you’re about 1/2 way done. The next thing you need to do is compress. The time it takes to compress your video matters as it can be a very, very long process. Personally I use a bunch of programs and devices to make this happen. One of them is a great device by Elgato systems called the Turbo.264 HD. This little USB stick will radically speed up the amount of time it takes to compress your video. The down side is that the video quality is not as high as something like my favorite compression tool Episode Pro. I like Episode because I can really get in to the guts of the CODEC and make it do what I want it to do. Since this is web video we have very little movement and the GOP can be really, really long! Another really great solution is built right in to Final Cut Pro. Compressor and QMaster are on the Final Cut Studio disc. Install QMaster services on as many Mac systems as you can on your local network and distribute the rendering load. Compressor makes some beautiful images if you’re editing right out of Final Cut Pro, but it is painfully slow. One thing I have wanted to try but have not had the time to yet is Episode Pro with a Matrox MXO2 Mini with Max. This should supply accelerated h.264 compression like the Turbo.264 HD but ties to Episode Pro so I would hopefully get the quality Episode Pro normally delivers. Could be a very powerful solution for web video!

Make multiple versions
You have no idea how your viewers are going to consume your content. This is web video, not TV! That means that a consumer can watch your content on an iPod, Zune, Apple TV, Roku, Computer, iTunes, Miro or something completely different. Make sure you make a mobile version, HD version and web version for each video, which means compressing it more than once!

Make your life easy — distribute with blip.tv
Blip.tv is a great way to upload each version of your show and distribute to multiple sources like YouTube, Vimeo, Archive.org, iTunes, Roku and others. After playing around with TubeMogul for a while I finally decided to stick with Blip.tv for our distribution partner. While they certainly have their glitches it is well worth the invested time to have a central place to distribute all my content. Grab a pro account while you’re at it, it is well worth the $$. Biggest down side that I have seen is that they have a 1GB upload limit which makes it hard to do long form content like Spacevidcast Live.

Remember to pimp out Spacevidcast.com
Whatever show you’re producing, remember to mention how awesome Spacevidcast.com is! Well, OK, maybe you don’t have to, but if you got any value from this post I would certainly appreciate a plug. We’re trying to change the world by edutaining it with human space flight, and the more people that get involved the better! My hope is that this post helps you produce better online video, and if it does the best way you can thank me is to plug our show from within your show. I know all of the Spacevidcasters out there would certainly appreciate it!

Of course if you need more information on how to make your new media production work, be it from equipment to production techniques, I am available to hire for consulting too. See the About page for more details.

The verdict
This Week in Space premiered today, and I have to say I was super excited (and a bit nervous as this show does compete with Spacevidcast). I love the work that Miles O’Brien and David Waters do so I had no doubt it would be world class. In my opinion it was a fantastic start, but I think they fell victim to a couple of the ‘do not’ tips listed above. Below is the final video they posted to Vimeo. Based on the tips above, do you think some of those items may have helped a bit, or am I just full of myself? You tell me in the comments! No matter what the case, it is FANTASTIC that other new media outlets are starting to come online to talk about space flight. With traditional media dropping the ball, space advocates can use all the help we can get! Competition aside, this is a badly needed show and I hope we’ll start to see even more great content coming out soon! I also hope that we kill ‘em in the viewer count, but that’s the competitive side in me that I’m not supposed to talk about.