GeoBeats, the Washington & New Delhi based travel video site (earlier coverage here) has released what it claims is the first travel video player built exclusively for the travel industry. The player seeks to redefine the way viewers watch travel video. I can’t say whether this is truly the first, but I haven’t come across such a brilliantly designed and well executed video widget. The player is a marvelous piece of widget engineering and demonstrates the power of widgets in mashing up different media streams.

Widgets are hot properties these days.(remember reading this post on TechCrunch some time back about MySpace’s acquisition of Flektor, primarily because it had created a inherently superior media widget as compared to Slide, RockYou– deal was rumored to be in 10-20 million $ range and happened within a week of Flektor’s launch). Widgets are ubiquitous on the web and their power emanates from their ability to mashup different streams of web content from disparate sources. This model dovetails neatly into the internet’s dominant character. For the web is not a large monolithic entity, rather, it is infinitely scattered amongst different genres of content, media types etc and you need the means to bind these together (or mash up) in a loose fashion. Widgets do this really well.

Coming back to the GeoBeats player- you can create your own custom player (have your logo, select your cities using a very intuitive navigational interface etc) and then watch travel videos for that city. The player gives you the option of looking up that destination on yahoo maps (right inside the player itself- thats amazing!), read up basic travel instructions, forward it by email etc. But why am I describing all this? This can’t be explained in words..it has to be experienced. So check out the custom player that I built for New Delhi. Make sure to try out all its options. And the icing on the cake are the videos themselves – professionally shot and crisply presented (user generated videos won’t stand a chance in comparison). The widget appears quite stable in usage as well. And as the screen-shot below shows, the workflow for creating the widget is also quite uncomplicated. (I must confess that I am tempted to copy parts of the widget’s design for my own work)

Also, take a moment to check out the GeoBeat Wall Of Fame, where all their international video producers are profiled.