We've been experimenting with putting full length films on to YouTube for free to see if people will watch them. Our first film was "The Aircraft of the Shuttleworth Collection" which has got over 80,000 views so far. This has now been followed by the 2008 Flying Legends Airshow.
Our next move is to offer HD Digital downloads of the shows and Pay Per View Streaming. Vimeo now have a PPV service so we'll be testing this out shortly.
Hopefully the store is now fixed, we'll be holding the special offer of the RIAT 2012 DVD for the next few hours for testing purposes!
Many apologies but our store doesn't appear to be working at the moment, we are working on a fix and hope to have it working soon.
Today we've uploaded two new videos to our YouTube site. One is a 7 minute film of the Mig 29 OVT at RIAT 2006 and the second is a 60 minute film of The Shuttleworth Collection filmed in 2004 and 2005.
The Shuttleworth film is an experiment to see if people will actually watch a whole 60 minute film on YouTube, we're looking at Digital Deliver on all our programmes for this year.
See for yourself here - YouTube Channel
So after a longer time than I would have liked the website is finally back online, so why did we bother changing it in the first place?
Our old site was shamefully neglected, it wasn't built very well to start with and changing things on it was a nightmare, the store wasn't very good and updates were nowhere near as frequent as I would have liked. We decided to update the site a while ago with the main idea of making it much easier to use, a much better shop experience and built around a system that would enable us to add regular updates.
Firstly we decided on a clean and simple look, this is a current trend in web design and it makes sites easier to navigate, we have links to our YouTube site, Facebook page and Twitter feeds on the homepage, and a direct Twitter feed on the right hand side. We'll be updating the cover video every few days as part of our plans to upload much more content to our YouTube site. The store is much easier to browse and the checkout experience should be a lot easier. We've also added Google Checkout for those people who don't have PayPal.
There's also a site search box which will do a keyword search through our products, blogs and any other content we have on the site. This blog is new and you can post comments on here if you feel the urge or you can use the contact form on the right hand side for direct messages.
The site should be iPad and tablet friendly and there is also a mobile version that will display if you use a smartphone.
We hope you'll enjoy the site and please feel free to feedback with any issues you find. This is just the first stage of a number of new developments we have planned for this year.
Putting together the store has been the biggest challenge of the whole exercise, the priority was to make the store experience much more user friendly. We have a lot of product variations so it's been hard making sure that the system works with all of them. We decided to use "drop down" menus on each title to show which options were available. Although the look of the site is very clean and simple, a LOT of work has gone in to making sure the design is flexible enough for all the new things we will be offering over the next couple of years.
Just getting everything together to launch the new Flying MachinesTV
So this is a test to see if it works