How does learning to play piano in 8 weeks sound to you? Too good to be true?

Well, think again because it is totally possible with http://pianoin8weeks.com/ by Brian Lucas. Brian Lucas is a lifelong musician and a graduate of the Berklee College of Music. He splits his time between performing, both studio and live, and teaching music. Brian has worked for companies such as HBO, Touchstone, ABC and has toured as a keyboard player and vocalist with Top 40 artists.

If you’re interested in checking out his Sparkeo video courses, you can find them here: http://www.pianoin8weeks.com/lessons.html or in the embedded Sparkeo player below!

We had the pleasure recently of asking Brian a few questions about teaching online video courses and were so moved by his answers, that we are posting them here below! 

What is your motivation to teach? 

I feel that it is my responsibility to pass on my knowledge to future piano players. People taught it to me, and I should in turn teach it to others. And with the internet, now you can do that on a much larger scale. So even though I’m performing a lot more and not teaching full time any longer, I can still attempt to reach anyone who wants to learn how to play the piano.

What is your passion? 

Teaching has always been a passion of mine. I’ve done it all through my life, even when it wasn’t my main focus. Other than that, making music will always be the greatest passion.

It takes time to create a video, right? Is it worth the effort? 

This was an experiment for me to see if I could capture the content from my private lessons and put it into a video format. It has taken a lot of time and money to launch the course, but in this first year, based on the feedback I’m getting, it was definitely worth it. I love getting emails from people happy to finally be able to play their favorite songs.

How has Sparkeo’s online video platform helped with this process?

It’s great to have a company like Sparkeo handle all of the billing and video streaming. It allows me to focus on creating and promoting the course and frees up time that otherwise would be spent on the technical side of things.

Are video courses effective? How is it different (for both teacher and student) compared to face to face lessons? 

You obviously have a harder time helping the student though mistakes, since you can’t see them. The difficulty in any video class is making it easy enough for the complete beginner, but still beneficial for the student who knows just a little piano. Also, teaching people how to think about music so we’re all on the same page can be a bit of a challenge. That’s why I spent a lot of time developing the scripts and testing the lessons out on test subjects (my poor friends). I think if you are going to try and teach a video course, you need to make sure a wide range of people will understand and benefit from it. For the student, it takes a lot more focus when you’re watching a video. Attention span can wander, especially if you’re home watching it. I’m sure many people stop and rewind the video when they realize they have been distracted and have missed something. It’s best to have a quiet place to watch the videos so you won’t be interrupted.

What makes your courses unique? 

I don’t teach the old “Every Good Boy” method of piano. And I don’t rely on memorization, the way most methods do. I realized over a decade ago that we teachers didn’t teach music the way I think about music when I play it. So I set out to change the way I teach and through trial and error, developed the Target Method I teach today, and have been using successfully for many years. It’s a combination of learning piano chords and sight reading of notes. It’s my goal that at the end of the 8 weeks, every student will know the core skills of piano and be able to apply it to playing their favorite songs.

Do you have a community? 

I participate in an online community of piano lovers at the Piano World Forum (http://www.pianoworld.com/forum). Among other things, they have an Adult Beginners Forum with a great community of piano students, piano players, piano teachers, etc. It’s a great place to get some extra help or share an achievement with other piano people. I also make myself available via email (DH: See Brian’s contact info below) for anyone with specific piano questions.

It sounds like you’ve had a distinguished career as a musician. Any special achievements along the way? 

I believe I have found a great balance between a performing life and the educational side of music. I’ve played with Top 40 acts, theaters, and been on recordings. This helps me be more relevant with the real world skills I teach. I think it’s this balance that helps me continue to do what I love and devote 100% of my time to improving both my playing and my teaching skills. 

Without further ado, here is Brian’s full 8 week piano course. Other Sparkeo video courses by Brian can be found one his site Piano in 8 Weeks. Enjoy!

Piano In 8 Weeks - Full Course

Brian can be reached by email and also actively participates in the Piano Forums at http://www.pianoworld.com/forum. You can also follow his course on the Piano in 8 Weeks Facebook Page.

This blog post is part of a regular column where we highlight video courses by experts using Sparkeo. If you have any comments, or would like us to feature your video course, please reach out to us in the comments, on Facebook, Twitter or Google+!

Want to sell your video courses online too? Sign up for Sparkeo here!

By Dani Horwitz, Community Manager

There are many basic factors that go into creating a successful online video course! These include the sound, lighting, and quality of the video to name a few. To be frank, if you viewers cannot understand what you are saying then your video will not have too much value, no matter how relevant it is!

Attaching more value

Beyond the basics, there are other elements offered by Sparkeo that can add a lot of extra value to your video course. Our video player is designed to offer your customers the ultimate online video learning experience and our features reflect that! One such example is the ability to attach a downloadable file to your video course.

This is one of our most popular features. The file, which can only be downloaded by the viewer once the course is purchased, will without a doubt bring your video added value. 

Your attached file can be anything from music notation to accompany a guitar video lesson to a chapter from your e-book that relates to your video course. No matter what it is, your viewers will feel like they are buying more than just the video. 

It’s simple to do

You add the attached file to your video course straight from our upload wizard. Meaning, after you begin uploading your video(s), you will be see a page asking for the video title and description. The bottom field on that page say “Add an Attachment”. It looks something like this: 

All you have to do is click the button that says “Browse” and select your file. If you are uploading a Multi-video course, you can upload one file per each video in the course.

A course that contains an attachment will have a little red number on the bottom of the video player, letting your customers know that there is an attached file, like you see here:

That is also where the viewer clicks to download the attachment.

Now you should be able to attach your own file to your Sparkeo video courses.  Stay tuned as we explore more Sparkeo features here on our blog and if you missed our previous post on Multi-video courses, make sure to check it out!

Have you attached a file yet to your courses on Sparkeo? We’d love your feedback about this feature and others that we offer. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, on Facebook, Twitter & Google+!

Want to sell your video courses online too? Sign up for Sparkeo here!

By Dani Horwitz, Community Manager

Press Release – Kaltura Partners with Sparkeo

Sparkeo Joins the Kaltura Exchange 
August the 16^th, 2012

Contact
Shay Michel, VP Business Development

Sparkeo is proud to announce a partnership with Kaltura.

What is Kaltura

Kaltura is the world’s first Open Source Online Video Platform, providing both enterprise level commercial software and services for video publishing, management, syndication and monetization, fully supported and maintained by Kaltura, as well as free open-source community supported solutions.

Kaltura’s customers include market leaders such as major media companies (Paramount, Warner Bros, HBO), big enterprises (Zappos, BestBuy, Siemens) and educational groups (Stanford, Yale, Pearson). See Kaltura’s customers. 

Kaltura disrupts the online video space and is a pioneer in the development of the html5 video standard through its html5 video library and website: http://html5video.org. html5video.org is an industry resource for HTML5 video-related issues. The site is supported by Mozilla, the Open Video Alliance and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Kaltura has also developed the Kaltura Application Exchange, which serves as an app store that enables its customers to access a wide range of services ranging from video PowerPoint synchronization to transcripting applications or plugins with both open source (Moodle) or commercial (SharePoint) platforms.

The Partnership

Sparkeo offers a complete set of tools and technology that enable content owners to monetize their media assets in a simple and efficient way.

The Sparkeo services include but are not limited to an integrated payment solution that instantly accepts secure transactions via credit cards or PayPal

The integration with Kaltura enables users to import videos to Sparkeo.com from any Kaltura account, they can then continue to interact with the videos and monetize their content.

“We welcome Sparkeo to the Kaltura Exchange, our unique video solutions marketplace where Kaltura customers and partners come together to find value-add solutions around online video,” said Luda Ruditsky, Director, Product Management at Kaltura “Integration with Sparkeo’s innovative technology enables Kaltura publishers to add paywall capabilities to their media assets and optimize their content selling processes.”

“Teaming up with Kaltura seemed very natural from the beginning, said Shay Michel, VP Business and Development at Sparkeo. Kaltura is a leader in the industry with a great cloud system and a top tier customer base. Its technology, its vision and the quality of its team made us want to be part of a common story. The very meaning of our agreement is to bring happy Kaltura customers the finest technology to efficiently commercialize their premium video content while delivering the greatest experience to their end users. We are just getting started.”

Sparkeo Demo

The following video displays the integration between Kaltura and Sparkeo and the ease of the process from the import of the video to its easy commercialization all across the web:

Sparkeo User Flow

The following document presents a step by step short manual enabling all users to make the most of Sparkeo’s platform and sell its content efficiently while delivering a great experience to their customers.

Kaltura Exchange - Sparkeo User Workflow

For more information on Sparkeo’s Kaltura Application, please visit Sparkeo’s profile on  the Kaltura Exchange: http://exchange.kaltura.com/content/video-payment-platform

Are you an absolute jazz guitar beginner or an experienced guitarist without a jazz background? Then you’ll most certainly want to check out this online video course from Marc-Andre Seguin at http://www.jazzguitarlessons.net!

This course contains no theory, just guitar playing! Once you watch and play along with the video a few times, you’ll possess a solid foundation in jazz guitar chords giving you “what it takes” to play most standard jazz songs! The course includes a PDF download. 

Watch the course in the video player below or find it at http://www.jazzguitarlessons.net/jazz-guitar-chords-3.html

Beyond the video course, we sat down with Marc-Andre, a professional jazz guitarist and teacher who has been teaching for over a decade including three years online, to ask him a few questions. He is now using Sparkeo’s video platform to deliver high quality instruction videos to a wider range of students. If you are a teacher or musician and thinking about online video courses, pay close attention to his advice! Here we go:

What is your motivation to teach?

Mostly through a selfish need for me to express ideas and share what I know with others. And also because I strongly believe in helping others achieve mastery of the jazz guitar. 

What is your passion?

Jazz guitar. Though teaching in general especially music (jazz and classical mostly), mathematics and statistics.

It takes time to create a video. Is it worth the effort?

It’s well worth the effort for what I’ve uploaded so far on Sparkeo. Not only on the ‘reaching a lot of people in my own niche’ level but also rewarding in the finances. 

At first, I had a “premium” video (by my standards) on YouTube and asked viewers to donate $5 if they liked it. I barely received any donations… 2 or 3 in the spawn of 2 months. The same video on Sparkeo the week after sold wonderfully for $7 and my earnings paid for a lot of my fees related to hosting the JazzGuitarLessons.net website. 

Do you find video courses effective? How are they different from face-to-face lessons?

Sparkeo videos are really effective, because unlike YouTube videos, I tend to be MUCH MORE precise: take this, practice that on the guitar, do it five times in a row by playing with me in the video, etc. It’s great! I have accompanying PDF’s with all the music notation too. Even some of my current Skype students (and in-person students) buy the courses on Sparkeo and re-watch them many times over. 

What is special about this course?

I have only 4 courses on Sparkeo and they’re all attaching different aspects of learning how to play jazz guitar. It would be hard to go into the details now… for the non-musicians :-)

Do you have any specific achievements that you can tell us about?

JazzGuitarLessons.net has over 5,000 subscribers to our newsletter, 500,000 YouTube views, and over 30,000 unique visitors every month & counting. On the personal musical level, I’ve been a “pro” musician since late in the first decade of the 2000s. Playing and teaching for a living including at the best jazz clubs. See MarcAndreSeguin.com for the full press kit.

Without further ado, here is the Jazz Guitar Into course:

Jazz Guitar Chords Introduction Course

You can reach out to Marc-Andre & let him know what you think about his video course on his Facebook & Twitter pages.

This blog post is part of a regular column where we highlight video courses by experts using Sparkeo. If you have any comments, or would like us to feature your video, please reach out to us in the comments, on Facebook, Twitter or Google+!

Want to sell your video courses online too? Sign up for Sparkeo here!

By Dani Horwitz, Community Manager

Sparkeo is designed so you can easily sell your videos anywhere online without having to worry about things like hosting, security and billing.

We provide many rich features that bring added value to our platform and your courses. Our platform is engineered in order to give your viewers the best video learning experience on the web! We invite you to follow our blog over the next several weeks as we explore the different features we offer!

Multiple video course

Whether you are uploading video lectures for an upcoming college course you’re teaching or a whole season of your latest tv show you just produced, you will not want to sell it as one long single video. Guaranteed. First, because the file you’ll need to upload will be huge (and most likely way beyond our 1.5 GB limit).  Next, and most important, your viewers will have a hard time digesting a single video that is hours long. The average attention span in today’s digital age is just around ten minutes according to some studies.

So what should you do? Simply create a multiple video course! A multi-video course is a video course comprised of a number of lessons. Each lesson is still limited to 1.5 GB though the entire course can be up to 15 GB! When someone buys the course, the will get access to the all of the lessons that the course entails.

Why are multi-video courses useful?

You’ll want to use Multi-video courses for a number of reasons. In addition to the extra space (a total of 15 GB as opposed to just 1.5 GB), your course will be much easier for the viewer to handle. How so? Well, have you ever tried to find the exact point you left off at in a 2.5 hour long video? It’s not the easiest of tasks. With a multi-video course, your viewer can quickly return to any video lesson and continue watching (see our video player below for a live example).

Furthermore, there is a big promotional advantage. We all know that buying a six pack of soda is a better deal than a single bottle. Similarly, if you have a bunch of individual videos lessons, you can combine them into a single course and sell it at a lower price per lesson. This will motivate your viewers to buy the combined course as they’ll get more for their money!

It’s Simple to do

The first step is obviously to log in to your account at www.sparkeo.com and click “Create Course”.

You should see a window like this

Next, click the red “Upload your video” button and highlight all of the videos you want to include in your course. If your videos are in different locations on your computer, you can just repeat these steps until all of your videos appear on the screen, looking something like this:

At that point, just click continue and let our upload wizard walk you through the rest of the process.

Once your course is complete, you’ll see a side bar on the right side of the player that contains all the individual lessons. Viewers can scroll up and down for easy navigation between the different video lessons. Give it a try in this Multi-video course, courtesy of http://pianoin8weeks.com/:

Piano In 8 Weeks - Full Course

So there you have it! You can now create your own multi-video course on Sparkeo. Stay tuned for upcoming posts, covering more Sparkeo features!

Have you uploaded a multi-video course yet on Sparkeo?  We’d love your feedback about this feature and others that we offer. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, on Facebook, Twitter & Google+!

Want to sell your video courses online too? Sign up for Sparkeo here!

By Dani Horwitz, Community Manager

Well, if you haven’t noticed yet, Sparkeo has a new look. Earlier this year, we launched our new site marking a major step in bringing you an unparalleled experience when selling videos online. Not only did our website have a significant makeover, but so has our platform as a whole.

Since we rolled out the new site, we have released dozens of new features and are no where close to stopping yet.  We released a much faster & slicker embeddable video player and drastically simplified our in video payment solution in order to increase conversions.

Additional features, to name a few, include: added security measures to protect your content from piracy, in-depth analytics showing you who is purchasing and watching your videos, coupon codes to allow you to run promotions on your courses, and better social sharing features right from the player. If for whatever reason you have not yet started selling your videos online, now is definitely the time!

If you have any great suggestions of features we may have missed or would like to get in touch for any other reason, please let us know! We monitor a whole bunch of social networks, including the comments here on Tumblr, facebook, Twitter, Google+ & LinkedIn, and encourage you to reach out to us on them. Additionally, you can email us at contact@sparkeo.com or Skype us! Whichever way works best for you, we are certainly listening. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Want to sell your video courses online too? Sign up for Sparkeo here!

By Dani Horwitz, Community Manager

Why do we build Sparkeo and invest so much time and passion to create a company despite all the adversity behind such a venture.

More generally, why people do what they do and what is one of the secrets of one’s success.

I believe that successful companies succeed because they have a clear vision about what they do it. Not only do they have such a vision within themselves; they succeed to convey it to their partners, employees, products and users.

Shay Michel, our VP BizDev give a great lecture on the golden circle. I don’t know if you know what it is. Here is a link to a TED lecture that explains the principle this concept. Take a look. It is worth your time!

Going back to Shay, he emphasized the fact that people do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

It can be arguable since in the end of the day, users buy a product and they won’t use a weak product no matter how strong the vision of its founders. (Yet, the paradox is a false one as strong products or products perceived as being strong not only deliver features but convey the reason why they were built.)

37 signal’s product convey their staunch commitment to simplicity while facebook its stance on the open web and the importance of sharing, as an example.

Big companies have in most cases a powerful vision that supports their growth. It is the case of Apple and the digital hub as well as transforming technology to a object of lust (hence the bitten Apple). Google, on the other hand, wants to organize all the information on the world from mapping your streets to scanning your books, from organizing all the web through their search engine to mapping the earth, from digitalizing all the museums in the world to powering blog creation. They are massively successful in implementing their vision (and much less in delivering a product in aspects of the business that are not aligned with such a vision as the social web!)

At Sparkeo we have such a vision: we want to enable powerful knowledge to flow to the web. We are the amazed witnesses of a fantastic change with initiatives such as TED or the Khan Academy, Academic Earth, iTunes U and so on. Great content is coming to the web. But still, in a huge amount of cases, it is prevented to do so because the advertising model is just not making the cut.

We conceived Sparkeo not as a provider of a technology but as a solution that provides the business models that enable this massive amount of premium content to go live and be accessible for the masses. Because we believe that in the world of today, the web should embrace its full potential and enable any users to learn from the best, be inspired. We believe it as we think that, with access to the corresponding powerful knowledge from the greatest experts worldwide (may it be expert in guitar, economics, magic or dental surgery), people can discover and fulfill themselves more powerfully. On the other side of the spectrum, we want those passionate experts that have so much to give to the world build a powerful business and feel the feeling of being rewarded for their expertise.

Times will tell if we succeed. But it is a fact that this is what magnetizes everyone on the team to get up every morning and get the job done. We have this common belief, this common passion or spark in the eyes. And this is worth fighting for.

By Frederic Aknin, Sparkeo Co-Founder & CEO

Frederic Aknin, Sparkeo Co-Founder & CEO.

     Sparkeo’s vision is to enable the flow of premium knowledge to the web in the format of social interactive video.