Airbnb launches AirbnbTV

nice..it's here:

http://tv.airbnb.com/

I'm sure they will iron out where to put this and the navigation points, etc.

1) Trust Factor..instantly elevated. People who might ask, "now why would I do that?" "who will use this?" - they can put those questions to "bed" by seeing a real person and watching real stories.

2) Huge branding win overall. Fun. Connected. Social.

3) Support - squashed tons of typical support questions with their very simple, clean short, videos.

4) Recruiting - Office Life. Any questions? Looks pretty cool.

They should take these video assets, syndicate them and make sure they go everywhere the eye can see. And track it all. Conversions to booking and what happens to the support queue, after publishing.

It looks like a lot of your bottom links are staying on the tv. subdomain, but don't resolve to anything there. (i.e. tv.airbnb/jobs 404s, the links should probably go to www.

This reminded me to actually use AirBNB for my New York stay. Hopefully someone agrees to host me before my hostel cancellation policy runs out of a deadline, I'd much rather sleep on a couch than in a dorm.

This is a great idea but on first glance I'm confused how this ties in with the messaging and reservation/order placement system on the main site. It seems you can just watch a video but then you have to separately go to the main site and again search for that listing in order to place a reservation for it.

The other question I had about this is how costly is it to host your own video? Or are they riding on top of some external video hosting service?

At the moment it seems Airbnb cherry picks the properties they want to promote with video - they don't allow regular users to upload videos of their properties to augment the images that they can already upload. Why not simply allow everyone to upload videos? Is this a cost issue? Because the current implementation creates an impression of unfairness - why promote only some properties and not others?