Friday 6 April 2007

Chess-Videos.com

A new website and forum with tremendous potential has recently started up. It's called Chess-Videos.com and is based around a simple idea. You join the forum at the website and then you can either post your own games to be analysed by the website's expert or you can download the open-source software CamStudio which will enable you to record and upload your own game analysis.

The analysis takes the form of a video of the game and an audio commentary. I've just had one of my games analysed by Josh Specht and was impressed by the results (if not the standard of my play!).

I think this is a great idea for a website because it is so interactive. In the spirit of Web 2.0 it allows people to come together to create their own content and benefit from interacting with others.

Join now before they start charging a fee!!!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ryan,

Thanks for the wonderful write-up in your blog! Also, don't worry we won't ever have a fee to the use forums. If it gets popular enough we may need some form of (tasteful) ads just to cover our bandwidth costs (videos use a lot of bandwidth). But my main idea was to create a forum where anybody could train and improve for free.

That being said, eventually I'd like to have a video archive that is subscription based and features GM and IM lectures/videos. This would, however, be in addition to the current forum structure. I think it would be really cool if we could have featured videos from top players in this form, but, again, this would be in addition to the main site.

The heart of chess-videos.com is and always will be, user-created content and a free community where people can create their own videos or comment on ones made by others.

Thanks again for the great write-up!

Ryan said...

Hi Josh,

I was only joking about there being a fee! It's good to know that you see it as a user-driven community based website too.

When Chess-Videos.com is a famous name I'll be able to say I was one of the first on the scene!

Good luck!

Anonymous said...

Hey Ryan,

thank you for drawing our attention to chess-videos.com, haven't seen it before.

I've seen you very active on chess.com. Please take a look at chessdom.com, feedback will be appreciated!

Cheers,
Goran

Ryan said...

Hi Goran,

Thanks. I'll give www.chessdom a look. Interesting name for the site btw ;)