Disney’s recently launched online content experiment Stage 9 has gotten plenty of press, almost universally bad. But their first program, Squeegees could have at least given itself a chance if it was willing to stand next to its criticism.

By making their content embeddable Stage 9 could have allowed people to make their own decision. Just about every online publication would have put it next to their bad review. If they had, it would have had far more than the 13,000 views it received so far on YouTube, maybe it would have even reached a few people who actually like it.

Not all content should be embeddable, valuable content deserves to be protected. But original content has no value until it has an audience. And any company experimenting in this space should have the foresight to work with its potential audience rather than against it.

Instead, far more people got a negative impression of Stage 9 content without ever seeing it, something they will carry with them next time they think of Disney/ABC. Then again, maybe Stage 9 just realized the content they created was so bad, reviews could never do it justice.

UPDATE: (I love it when they listen) The first show is now embedded below.

I’ve been a fan of Viddler’s platform for a while, mainly for its simplicity and high quality encoding. I turned to Viddler for my personal online video player needs when Brightcove abandoned their personal services.

On Feb 26th, Viddler introduced the first official release of their platform’s wordpress plug in, enabling WP users to embed Viddler-hosted video directly from the Wordpress dashboard. Nice touch for people who have already adopted Viddler as their “not-YouTube” video platform and happen to be bloggers. Like me. Works similarly as the Slide plug in for Facebook, grabbing videos from YouTube.

For any of you who have heard me rant about widgets lately, you should know that I found some personal vindication tonight watching CNBC’s Fast Money when this little gem came on…

By the way, the show has plenty of web-extra video, including longer form clips of nearly every segment of that day’s show in their Rapid Recap.

Here’s a look at the widget for yourselves.

But for all of us in the industry, what is so tough to comprehend about widgets? Ok, you want a portable rich media unit that plays video and drives traffic back to your main site to sign up for newsletters or podcasts. And you want to measure total embeds, total minutes of video delivered across each distribution platform, sign-ups for the newsletters and downloads of podcasts. You’d like to look look at the average abandonment point where people are dropping off so you can trim the video segments to deliver an optimized user experience.

Which one of those are you going to call your primary success metric, secondary success metrics, and did you achieve them or not? At end end of the day, is the total number of minutes of video content of the “Fast Money” show viewed, aggregated across all of the platforms, the most important measure? If, after a week, there is a drop off of in watching video through the widget, is it a failure?

With all of these moving parts - which differ for each vertical category of advertisers and niche content - why are people looking for ‘one’ metric - engagement - to replace the universal CTR? I’m not suggesting that CTR should stick around, but we need to accept the fact that online media has gotten a lot more complicated than it ever has been, and we should treat it and talk about it as such. But I digress….

Nice job CNBC. Clean, functional widget that meets your goals. Too bad that co-host Jeff Macke called it a virus, and regular contributor Tim Seymour explained why it shouldn’t be called a widget to begin with. (Tim - I’m with you, buddy!) But I hope you factor that into account when you measure total downloads and evaluate the results.

I’m still watching the debate but forgot to post my online video pick for earlier tonight - but its not actually online. quarterlife, the drama originally created for the web has finally made its TV debut tonight on NBC at 10pm.

So catch it on your DVR if you remembered to set it, or catch full episodes on NBC.com, and clips on MySpaceTV, and on hulu. Hats off to Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick for proving that (writer’s strike aside) good content will be found, and great content will find its way to mainstream media.

NBC picked up quarterlife - originally rejected by ABC - back in November. It will certainly be interesting to see the growth in audiences of the full episodes on TV and NBC.com (and possibly hulu) vs. the original 8-minute clips on MySpaceTV.

Remember…

Herskovitz and Zwick have tailored “Quarterlife” for the Web, blending the personal relationship stories they did best in programs like the high-school drama “My So-Called Life” with a saga centered on Dylan, a blogger, and her best friends.

Will the “real” fans, who’ve been watching on the web for months, take to the long form version? Or will they be turned off by the network’s censors? Again remember..

Herskovitz said “Quarterlife” will be free of constraints on language and other risky content TV networks often censor.

Anyone taking odds?

Online video startup Fliqz has been on our radar for a while. Founded in 2005, the company provides a customized flash player solution for approximately 2000 clients and recently added 3.2 million to an initial $2.5 million of second round funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Despite a solid partner list and good technology very little has been written about them, so today I took time out to speak with Kris Drey, VP of Product Development and Fliqz blogger, to get a little more insight into what they’re up to.

Fliqz, initially conceived as a “Shutterfly for video” solution allowing users to host video privately, shifted gears as the company secured funding and realized that there was a niche in providing professional quality players at a low price to mid-level content companies.

“We don’t consider ourselves a Brightcove competitor” Drey said. Instead the company is focused on providing a “friendlier” completely customizable plug-and play offering for midsize companies looking to easily build unique user experiences.

Part of this is making the process simple. A self-serve player creator walks customers through building their own custom players, and an IE toolbar is available that allows users to upload content and receive an embed code directly from the browser. Their Fliqzter widget makes it possible to upload content to Fliqz from any website.

Fliqz offers four tiers of service; basic is free but Drey said most customers opt for Silver or Gold packages: $199 and $499 a month for 1,000 and 10,000 streams served respectively. These also offer additional customization options such as watermarking, ad integration and advanced analytics. For a development fee Fliqz will custom skin players.

MLS Big Shot: Katie’s Hat Trick

And the focus on ease of use has paid off. Over the past year Fliqz has partnered with MLS for their “Big Shot” UGC video contest (above), VH1 to power a platform for user interaction with content, and Friendster. Expect to see more from these guys to come.

For your enjoyment -

When will ABC and other networks come up with a suitable syndication alternative to YouTube? It’s gotta be pretty clear videos like this will get virally distributed online but no network has come close to making them as easy accessible as YouTube.

Corey adds: Actually, I disagree with you there. Hulu does an excellent job with their Conan O’Brien, Leno and Carson Daily clips. You can trim their clips to whatever length you want, and then embed them. But people still go to YouTube first, assuming they’ll have it. Process-wise, getting it up on YouTube is still a pain in the a&& for the first person.

Well, allow me to retort: NBC is getting there, I’ll give them that. Hulu is still in Beta and NBC.com has enabled embedding albeit with a big ass ad for NBC below it. But finding NBC content on YouTube is easier than on Hulu or NBC.com And ABC and CBS have no suitable alternative.

The original:

It isn’t every day a top 200 site in worldwide traffic shuts down, but for Stage6 it’s been a long time coming. DivX announced today that they will be shutting down their video sharing site at the end of the month. DivX’s Tom Huntington broke the news to users:

So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.

The company had tried unsuccessfully to sell the company, but despite its high traffic the operational costs (and legal risks - the site is rife with unlicensed content) were apparently too high.

DivX will instead focus its full attention on its core competency of creating industry-leading compression technology and will let others figure out how to make money delivering it online.

Kicking the week off with Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute. This week she explains the three-video deal between online comedy duo Rhett and Link and TVGuide Network, and the move by social networking company KickApps to strike deals with content delivery networks to offer its video player for free to their customers.

This wasn’t even an online video story, except that MSNBC does a great job of making clips of stories, particularly their news shows, available.

I was catching up on my Sunday morning roundtable shows before the Oscars, and had to hear this??

I just watched the clip and decided to embed it here for the hell of it. Then Ralph Nader joining the race for president became an online video story. Guess how? The second time I watched the clip, I got the same 30-second pre-roll ad for Boeing. But Mr. Nader also promised that his website would be the most interactive of any presidential candidate. He’s got the basics, but he’s just quite there yet. Sign up and donate, or see his whole platform, but as of this writing, the links to Facebook, MySpace and YouTube don’t work. Maybe that’s why he’s advertising for some web development help on the site, too. But we like that he’s looking for some videographers. Dont forget to send those videos our way, Ralph!

According to an article in Marketwatch, CBS is looking to put their Innertube fiasco behind them by reintroducing some additional series into their video offering, making it easier to enjoy your old faves as well as their current line up of TV fare across the 300+ sites and partners in their CBS Audience Network.

CBS will be adding full episodes of “Hawaii Five-O,” “Star Trek” “The Twilight Zone,” “MacGyver” and “Melrose Place.” CBS previously abandoned their own efforts in favor of creating a distribution network of partners including Bebo, Comcast, Joost, MSN and Veoh, as well as social-networking partners such as YouTube, Meebo, MeeVee, RockYou, and VideoEgg.

The best news, though, is the recognition by CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith that, “clients want to buy across platforms.” However, Smith also noted that, “the conversations are starting at the network level,” and that will continue to present challenges for the interactive advocates to make a better case for the medium. CBS is finding a way to drive interactive ad sales, and still keeping the budgets flowing into TV first.