Video online is fast becoming the "industry standard" for sharing information, introducing new products and services, demonstrating new ideas and providing virtual tours for anything from new cars to houses and holiday destinations.

Zac has developed SMACKB!Z to help businesses with a need for video on-line to edit, upload, store and organize their videos quickly (up to 100 times faster than other ordinary systems) all in one easy-to-use professional package.

SMACKB!Z is a complete, powerful tool for managing video and delivering video within the enterprise and across the web. It provides a modern framework that supports all the common video codecs and it integrates seamlessly with !SMACK!, the video compression and upload tool. SMACKB!Z enables enterprises to create value out of their existing video libraries and enhance dramatically opportunities to build valuable video content. SMACKB!Z creates engaging, interactive, online video that improves user experience, increases customer satisfaction and user productivity.

You can use SMACKB!Z to bring any of the common video types into your business or organization. !SMACK! converts 150 common video formats, 50 audio codecs and 30 videos codecs. If you have a special requirement for an obscure format, please contact us and we’ll let you know if it is supported.

Whether you are an insurance company taking claims as video uploads together with the related claim information or a legal firm displaying video profiles of your key staff, SMACKB!Z ensures, you can now use video as much more than a promotional tool. SMACKB!Z is your knowledge management tool for video.

Control
With SMACKB!Z, businesses and organizations can control the storage, display and upload process for videos adding value to their business and not someone else’s User Generate Content site.

Look & Feel
SMACKB!Z provides a fully skinable display and video upload so video can be easily embedded into your existing site. The video library will look and feel like part of your site without the need for complex coding – just paste into your existing paged, reducing time to market and management overheads.

Web Traffic
Placing video on UGC sites drives traffic and business away from your site. SMACKB!Z lets you control costs with faster time to market getting video into websites and reduced upload bandwidth costs with highly efficient uploads.

Customisation
The few simple generic video descriptors on other generic video sites do not offer businesses and organizations enough flexibility to describe their video assets. SMACKB!Z lets video become an online business information tool. Create value with existing video archives. SMACKB!Z transforms video from an untidy collection into the world of enterprise knowledge management.

Security/Privacy
For security and privacy reasons, businesses and organizations must manage and keep their own video on their infrastructure rather than handing it over to a User Generated Content destination sites like YouTube MySpace/Facebook. Many organisations have a duty of care entrusted to them that cannot be simply handed over to a third party. The due diligence of such organisations will be shown as insufficient if private information is compromised. For example, insurance companies accepting claims by video have strong commercial and privacy reasons for not allowing this video outside their control. Schools cannot let information about students to be distributed without permission.

Speed and Size
!SMACK! is seamlessly integrated with SMACKB!Z which means businesses and organizations can take advantage of pre-compressed uploads saving employee’s time and bandwidth.

You need an existing website on a webserver with the PHP language installed. Almost all hosting companies offer this service. Start your trial or buy SMACKB!Z now. The installation process takes less than 10 minutes.

No. SMACKB!Z uses the SQLite database included in PHP saving you the trouble of creating, securing and managing another database. SQLite is ideally suited to video delivery being 2-3 times faster than MySQL and often faster.

Using SMACKB!Z, you can create rich, easy-to-use online video displays. Video can be seamlessly included in existing pages saving you the trouble of building a whole new website.

The video files, thumbnail images and video information are stored on your filesystem where you can maintain control over their security and privacy. Use them, or modify them as you wish. They’re not held within a database where they are difficult for you to access or protect.

Yes, the information related to each video uploaded via !SMACK! to SMACKB!Z is defined by you and can be simple or specific to your exact requirements. Together with system generated information like the video size, you can request many different types of information from the person uploading with !SMACK! As well as text, numeric, date and dropdown fields, there are hidden, fixed, password, checkbox and display only fields. Each can have tool tips and default values, specific to the section of your site.

!SMACK! can be launched with different configurations from different pages of your site.

• Fields can be fixed or have default values that can be overridden.
• Instructions and warnings can be displayed (in rich text).
• Checkboxes or other fields can be made mandatory.
• Only appropriate fields need to be input for the appropriate section of your library.
• Colours and background defined per launch configuration
• Multiple displays per page
• Specify which information is to be displayed for each display
• Specify the search criteria to initially display and the sort order
• Allow or deny continued searching
• Variable layout per display (rows and columns)
• Variable information position
• Variable information order, labels, formatting (bold)
• Variable size of thumbnails
• Variable number of videos to be shown per page per display
• Configurable search and navigation bars
• Colours and background defined per display

The creation and use of information fields is separated to reduce the risk of repetition of similar fields. Each field can be exposed to Search Engines and/or the internal search within SMACKB!Z.

Through the Advanced Search of SMACKB!Z, power users can trawl your video repository to gradually refine the list of videos they are looking for.

The combined effect of these features is to create the first knowledge management tool for video.

Yes, SMACKB!Z overcomes the issues Flash applications have with creating Search Engine pages by responding to Search Engine robots with html code of the video information you have defined as searchable. So unlike most Rich Internet applications, you don’t have to sacrifice your Search Engine rating to use SMACKB!Z and it’s advanced features.

One benefit of SMACKB!Z is to devolve responsibility for video upload to the video creators. Whether they are your employees or visitors to your site, the person uploading inputs the video information in the manner you request. You can now receive valuable video content on your site generated without specialized staff costing you money manually writing it. Audio Visual staff can return greater value as online video librarians. Whether you are producing the videos inside your organisation or encouraging website visitors to upload videos such as video insurance claims or problem illustrations, SMACKB!Z provides you many opportunities to monetize video on your site. Instead of searching though cupboards full of videos, SMACKB!Z creates a highly available and searchable video archive giving you many new opportunities to leverage the value of you video assets.

The fastest way to find and deliver video information, thumbnails and video is to index them in a database. SMACKB!Z takes care of that for you by using the super fast SQLite database included within the PHP application language on your webserver. There is no separate database installation or maintenance required at all. The SMACKB!Z administration tool ensures database integrity and provides video reconciliation reports to make sure everything is running as you wish.

SMACKB!Z helps you design a look and feel to display your videos online which can be seamlessly embedded in your site. It’s really easy. All you do is paste the generated code from SMACKB!Z into your web page. This means you can add customised video content anywhere on your site. For example, you can decide how many videos to display on each page, select the display order, as well as their size and layout and look and feel. And more importantly, you can set out what information you’d like to show with each video thumbnail. By combining different arrays of selected videos, you can achieve any page design you can think of. Because you generate the code to paste into your existing pages, with SMACKB!Z the only limit to create display of video is your imagination.

With SMACKB!Z, you can define as many the template styles for !SMACK! as you need. If one section of your website has a red background, the !SMACK! template can be changed to red. Background images, gradients, text colours and more are also supported. You can match the look and feel of any section of your site and more importantly can request, generate and store videos and video information specific to that section.

SMACKB!Z runs on any Apache webserver which has PHP installed using –with-sqlite=/path/to/lib/

This combination is very widely available from hosting providers. SMACKB!Z is currently available in English. If other languages are required, please contact Zac for assistance.

Yes you can start your trial now. It is limited to 10 videos. You can see how it will benefit your site at no cost and without giving out your credit card details. You can upgrade to a higher limit without losing any of the videos already uploaded or any of your configuration settings.

Customers with a Standard or Premium ZacWare Support Agreement are entitled to installation support, maintenance and proactive updates to keep their installation current. Standard includes a one day response during business hours AEST and Premium includes a 3 hour response, 24*7.

Put simply, !SMACK! is a great tool for smacking videos onto websites really easily or more technically, !SMACK! is a client side video compression and upload tool with some editing features.

SMACKB!Z gives websites have their own User Generated Content but with full control over the uploaded content and how you want to display it. SMACKB!Z let’s businesses use video as a knowledge management tool, relieves problems associated with storing large numbers of videos and combined with !SMACK!, provides a complete system to generate a very valuable video resource.

!SMACK! and SMACKB!Z both use Adobe’s Flash Player 9. The Flash Player Express Install has been implemented to provide users who have Flash Player 6.0r 6.5 or later with a smooth, in-context upgrade to version 9.

Here’s just a few things you can do with SMACKB!Z right now:

• Create your own video library online. No specialised expertise needed
• Manage your video on the web, avoid copyright issues
• Store uploaded videos on your server, they stay under your control
• Share views only inside or outside your network
• Allow uploads from only inside your network or from the internet as well
• Scaleable video storage
• Compress videos automatically on the !SMACK! client to reduce size of video library and the time to upload and download
• Build advanced video
• Search Engine friendly display pages and video information
• Users can upload their own videos, releasing audiovisual staff for higher level duties not just copying and cataloging videos
• Define information for collection related to the video during upload
• Define custom video displays: For example, add and display Sports videos in one area with different video information and look & feel to the News videos you upload and display in another.

Keep an eye out for the next release of SMACKB!Z as we’re currently testing:

• Bulk loads of videos of any format: rapidly import an existing offline video library including all it's associated info
• Popularity by views: views this week, views this month, totals views
• Lead-in and Lead-out videos: Monetize the time before and after videos are watched.
• Video Annotation: Add notes like chapters and hyperlinks at places during videos
• Ratings: Allow viewers to rate videos

And we have more being developed:

• Manual approval: Before display, the video would need approval.
• Random display: A random selection of videos from a category
• Videos currently being watched: Same as YouTube

Yes, download the SMACKB!Z.1.0 trial here.

Yes. A version of !SMACK! for Mac OS X will be released during the third quarter of 2007.

No. SMACKB!Z. continues to require Flash Player 9, the same as other new Flex applications.

Yes, you can upgrade your existing install. Of course you should back up your existing installation before upgrading. Customers with Standard and Premium support agreements qualify for upgrade support.

Yes, all you have to do is paste the custom code you generate in SMACKB!Z into the HTML code of your web page. It’s that easy.

Yes, you can install the trial version on your test server. A license must be purchased for any installation requiring a video limit higher than 10 on development servers.

Yes, as long as they are installed in different locations on that server.

Yes, all you do to add SMACKB!Z videos to your site is place the code generated in SMACKB!Z onto your web pages. Simple as that.