SpeedBit Team Blog

All summer long we’ve been very busy, burning the midnight oil as they say, on lots and lots of fixes, new features, refinements and redesign.

Now, all that hard work is supposed to pay off with an upcoming slew of betas, releases and much more. Stay tuned, as we unveil the fruits of our hot summer labour.

For starters, we’ve uploaded a new version for SpeedBit.com. It looks entirely different now. Our team went back to the drawing board, and essentially re-designed the whole aesthetic concept for the website.

But the graphic changes are just the tip of the iceberg - as we also rebuilt the site structure & topology from scratch. For the first time, SpeedBit users can browse, review, download and buy all of our software from within a single website.

All of our products (DAP, SpeedBit Video Accelerator, MailInfo, etc.), our web services (FileFlyer, FileRatings.com) can be easily found and downloaded in a single click, using a simple but effective navigation.

When facebook launched their new website facelift, not long ago, the web was filled with reviews and comments, for and against (examples here and here). It seemed almost everybody had an opinion about it and that can only be a good thing!

We encourage you to do the same: Let us know what you like and dislike in our new design. What else would you like to see in Speedbit.com and what is “just right” as it is?

You are more than welcome to leave your comments here, or leave a link to your review, if u want to display it on your personal site or blog.

We hope you will be excited with the new SpeedBit.com as we are!
If you only know SpeedBit through just one of our products - now is your chance to explore all of our other products and services - most of them are free and the rest are free to try!

Happy browsing
The SpeedBit.com Team

Popularity: 49% [?]

We released a new SpeedBit Video Accelerator beta last week - and we’re very excited.
This beta adds acceleration support for the new Netflix “Watch Now” (download on demand) service.

Like our SpeedBit Video Accelerator Premium users already know - having SVA run on top of your movie download app - whether it be iTunes or NetFlix, makes all the difference.

Our users report:
Downloading a single 50 minutes TV episode - can shrink from 3 hours of downloading to a mere 20 minutes with SpeedBit Video Accelerator!

That’s the difference between watching what you download at the same day, to watching it the day after

We’d also like to note that unlike the iTunes version, we have decided to make the Netflix support free for a limited trial period.

We believe that once you experience your movie downloads with it - the value of Speedbit Video Accelerator Premium will become ever more clear.

As usual - the new version supports all the free features:
Acceleration of streaming videos from youTube and other 100+ sites
(facebook videos included !), integral web-wide video search (powered by TruVeo), and a “recently accelerated” list which functions as a kind of “history” tab.

So if you can’t wait for the official release - go on and try the beta now.

Davidi,
FileFlyer.com Product Director

Popularity: 94% [?]

Without drum beats or horn blows, we released the new version of the SVA website late last week.
When we release a new software version, it always seems “more important”, than merely facelifting a few web pages.
But the truth of the matter is, there is more to redesigning a website, than just plain “aesthetic optimization”, especially in this case.

Together with the SpeedBit design team, we decide that a complete re-design is needed, rather than a “patch job” on the old site.
We didn’t feel obligated to stay within the confines of a standard, color-on-white, corporate website presumptions and the result is the slick, stylish, dark-gray (it’s not black - see Ohad? I remember ) design you can see now. We love it.

In addition to overhauling the visual design, we also wanted to implement more features that we already knew we want, but never had time to put them in.
There’s a new Frequently Asked Questions section under Help, with new Q&As from our support team, including a brand-new online firewall guide.

We improved & redesigned the Server Status page, now completely database driven, which now allows you to see which of our 100+ supported sites is compatible with your SVA version in real time.
The new Buy page was redesigned to better address PC iTunes users.

All of the coverage and media exposure we got since we first released SVA, was also reorganized and redesigned, and can now be easily thumbed through in our Press section or directly from the homepage.

So even though this wasn’t a “new version release”, it was still a not-so-small challenge, and we are very happy and proud to offer our users a better browsing experience.
I know we are excited about the new videoaccelerator.com and I can just hope you will be too, when you see it.
So what are you waiting for, come on down!

Davidi,
SpeedBit Video Accelerator Team

Popularity: 94% [?]

As internet video keeps on growing and evolving, we encounter more and more original ideas of what to do with it.

One of those original ideas was the “video embed” feature, that caught
on like wildfire. Embedded videos free us from the shackles of coming
to watch videos at one big video repository (a la Youtube). They allow
any site owner, blogger, or social network user to “copy-paste”
whatever video he/she wants into his/her own page.

Another stage of evolution, that springs directly form the embedded
videos, are the Video Players. Not unlike the multimedia players we
use for DVD & DivX, these players are our web videos flat panels. In
actuality, they are usually a browser component dedicated to showing
embedded streaming videos, with some kind of a nifty UI to allow easy
control over the video playback.

Some say that the web video players are nothing more than a passing
fad, that they have no real justification. Others claim that by using
a specific UI to browse and watch videos, you can create new and
unique user experiences, that could elevate the user experience to be
par with real television and VOD.

Whatever your personal choice may be, we have made sure SpeedBit Video Accelerator would support it - and lets you watch it smoothly, without breaks and pauses.

Veoh has a slick player application and 5min.com has an advanced,
nifty web player. Both are compatible with SVA and will support
acceleration.

Because wherever video is headed in the internet, we can help it get
there faster, and without interruptions on the way

So keep watching,

Davidi,
SpeedBit Video Accelerator Team

Popularity: 99% [?]

Just two nights before thanksgiving, we were able to launch SpeedBit Video Accelerator 2.2.0.7

Aside from rooting out a lot of annoying bugs and technical issues, we were able to raise the bar - and we currently support over 60 major video sites.

I think we should all be thankful, to live in an era when information, even visual information, is so handy, so accessible that it can be reached by millions almost immediately.

I am quite sure that the forefathers never foresaw the internet video revolution, and I’m sure they never even dreamt of “buffering problems” and “loading bottlenecks”.
Even though, one must admit - turkey tastes really good

Happy Holidays,

Davidi,
SpeedBit Video Accelerator Team

Popularity: 97% [?]

After a lot of sleepless nights, blood-sweat-n-tears, and a few coronary arrests, we have done it: The new SVA is out!

With a lot of fixes to the main acceleration engine, and the whoppin’ “over 50 sites” support, there’s a lot to try out and use in this new version.

Whatever you use web videos for, chances are SpeedBit Video Accelerator can make it better for you

Are you a diehard fan of YouTube, Dailymotion and Veoh?
Like to see friend videos on FaceBook & MySpace?
Maybe you’re an avid gamer, watching new game reviews on EA & GameTrailers?
Are you a news junkie, preferring videos on CNN and Reuters?
Do your friends put their family videos with their family photos, on Photobucket?
Are you curious about Tudou and other far-east video sites?

Whatever is the destination, SpeedBit Video accelerator can (try to ) make it a smoother, non-stop video experience

Check it out!

Davidi,
SpeedBit Video Accelerator Team

Popularity: 100% [?]

I wish I could start this post with a drum roll. There are so many more things we want to do with SpeedBit Video Accelerator, that every beta release is like a small step forword. We managed to eliminate many “false positive” detections by security apps. Also solved some issues with the “recently accelerated” list, and improved the Vista support.

We really hope this version is going to take us foreward. Of course, as ever, we would highly appreciate your feedback and comments, so we can nip out all the bugs and quirks. Especially since SpeedBit Video Accelerator supports over 50 video sites in this version, we need as much people as possible just watching videos, so we can see how well it works, what can we improve even more, and what other sites we should think about adding.

You can just leave your comment here, or you can contact our support. In any case, any information form you, would be invaluable to us.

Davidi,
SpeedBit Video Accelerator Team

Popularity: 97% [?]

Working on an application like SpeedBit Video Accelerator, is ever-exciting.
Here’s my wish-list for this week:

I’m pondering over the last item, over the weekend…
Basically it means that some security applications, mainly antiviruses, are falsely detecting SpeedBit Video Accelerator (it is 100% spyware free), as a positive case of a “suspicious application”.

This happens mostly since it’s a hard work for security companies to keep track of all the new software out there. Especially internet applications, as they tinker with the connection between your browser and the web. In order to be efficient, Antiviruses are strict by nature. They’d rather block an unfamiliar internet app, than let it enjoy the benefit of the doubt. Reasonable enough.

Our problem, of course, is that many users will take the word of their security app, over our “spyware free” assurances.
What do you do then?

Well, some security applications approved us without us having to do a thing. Especially with the rapid growth of SpeedBit Video Accelerator, it didn’t remain an “unfamiliar internet application” very long. Hey, security programers watch internet videos too, right?
Other apps we have to approach by ourselves. Right now, we are down to four:
Kasperskey, Nod32, Avast! and DrWeb, all good programs by the way, in my opinion.

For each application, the process of submitting a “false positive” request is different. I won’t bore you with bureaucracy, but it’s mostly painstaking work of zipping the right files and naming them correctly and then submitting the correct case number on the required field, etc.

The good news is, I already heard back from DrWeb, and they assured us we’ll be on the “OK” list on their next update. So hopefully, by the time you read this, your DrWeb antivirus will clear us - no problem

If you are using one of the other security antiviruses and needs some more re-assurance, I recommend downloading a free trial version of another security software (you can find a whole bunch of them here), and see for yourself.

Davidi,
Speedbit Video Accelerator Team

Popularity: 98% [?]