Blog Tag: virtual tour provider

Happy Holidays & SYSTEM-WIDE Updates From RTV

December 24, 2019

virtual tour software holiday card

It’s been a VERY productive year over here at RTV and being that it’s the holiday season we have MUCH to celebrate. For those of you that keep up with us in our Facebook group, you see our regular posts as we launch new marketing tools, products, and features. For everyone else out there that’s too busy or have not kept up with all of our product launches and enhancements over the last five months you’re encouraged to review this blog post in its entirety as it contains a complete summary of all RTV virtual tour software updates since August of 2019.

Before going over the update list below, please take a minute and check out the massive improvements that have been made to our core technology here at RTV by clicking a few of the links below:

3 New Property Site Layouts:

Centauri Layout – https://fusion.realtourvision.com/s/8176-Lakeside-Trl-Williamsburg-MI-49690-1866756

Anvil Layout – https://fusion.realtourvision.com/s/7734-Elk-Tip-Dr-Rapid-City-MI-49676-1862721

Tyche – https://fusion.realtourvision.com/s/850507

New Virtual Tours Skin Introduced:

Still Photos Tour With Fusion Slim Carousel – https://fusion.realtourvision.com/703969

Mixed Media Tour With Fusion Slim Carousel – https://tours.bluelavamedia.com/391092

Impressive right??!! Now that you’ve seen the really slick front end stuff which is what keeps your customers coming back to you, I would encourage all of you to review the list below as many of these items will put more money in your pockets in 2020. There are some BIG lead generating items below as well as several new revenue boosters that you can start offering to your customers immediately.

“Looking into early 2020, RTV customers can expect Stripe integration for payment collection, payment collection before image download, photography only job scheduling and delivery, improved Fusion default settings for faster tour creation time, and more.”

Fusion Manager Updates:

11-27-19
RTV Launches FusionSite – We are VERY proud to announce FusionSite, RTV’s Property Website Maker. FusionSite allows our users to generate gorgeous individual property websites with the click of a mouse. Our new property sites come with the purchase of any virtual tour credit and will be available as branded and non-branded in the deliverables sections in your TMS. The property sites are fully responsive, playback streaming video and support embedded content such as Matterport productions or 4K YouTube videos.

11-7-2019
New Winter Backgrounds – We have added five new Winter backgrounds in the themes/backgrounds section for our users in the Northern parts of the world. These stylish backgrounds are available as tour backgrounds as well as themes. Enjoy!

10-4-2019
Google Analytics & Facebook Pixel Support Added – This update to our virtual tour system is simply a marketer’s dream come true! You can now drop google analytics and facebook pixel code directly into your productions for even deeper tracking and remarketing. If you have a customer that would like to have their code on the productions as well, no problem! RTV’s Fusion system is capable of handling your code, the broker’s code, the agent’s code and the owner. No marketing left behind! To get started click on “Profile” then on “Tracking Codes” from within your virtual tour manager. Happy Marketing!

9-17-2019
New 2020 HotSheet Code – Power users that are using Fusion’s virtual tour RSS feeds to automatically blog or to generate email blasts are sure to love our new 2020 HotSheet. A HotSheet is a list of your most recent real estate virtual tour productions that get sent out to your customer base as you create new tours. We’ve taken into consideration that 50% – 70% of the recipients will be looking at the HotSheet email message from a mobile device. Our new improved HotSheet is clean, responsive, and very user-friendly. Have a look at the resulting email message here. If you’re interested in creating a HotSheet for your business you will need an email client such as Aweber first. Users may access their HotSheet code from the Fusion Manager by clicking on “FSD”, followed by “Tours”, then on “Map Code, RSS Feed” on the right. In 2019 the HotSheet was the second-largest source of leads for BlueLaVaMedia next to the affiliate logo on the tours.

8-10-2019
New “Take a Tour” Buttons – We have added twenty new and modernized “Take a Tour” buttons. Those adding a production to a website via our “Tour Button” code will like some of the new choices of buttons that we now have. To set your default tour button, log into your tour manager and click on “Settings”, “Resource Pool”, “Button Pool” and choose a new and modern button as your default tour button!

Tour Player Updates:

11-27-19
Audio AutoPlay Improvements – Making sure that audio auto-plays on both our tours as well as our new property sites is very important. It is also however up to each browser and dependant on a multitude of factors such as how often a user has been to a domain and interacted with it. Our users should immediately see improvements with their virtual tours and property sites auto-playing audio as long as they have been to the particular domain twenty times and have clicked on allow audio 20% of the time or greater. Since this is a moving target and different with each browser users should expect it to continually change.

10-4-2019
New Responsive Tour Players Launched – RTV is committed to having the World’s BEST virtual tour players and technology available to professional photographers. This latest round of updates puts our HTML 5 tour players well ahead of the pack. Our new sleek tour designs provide a modern look and feel and work better than ever across all mobile devices. This update to Fusion Experience and Fusion Slim includes the following:

  • The ability to add an image carousel to Fusion Slim – See Example
  • We took this opportunity to give Fusion Slim some additional features such as lead capture, language translation, password protection, scene descriptions, and tools.
  • Fusion Slim’s dropdown menu can now be turned on or off via the Tour Options menu.
  • The Tools button on both tour players can also now be turned on or off from the Tour Options menu.
  • Users will notice that both virtual tour players have a slightly faster image fade time when moving from one scene to the next and we have maximized the efficiency of both tour players to gain even more impressive virtual tour load time – Check it Out
  • This update gave both tour players updated status banners (sold, pending, etc.), the ability to add a drop shadow to both the scene titles and scene descriptions, new modern hotspot caption bubbles, improved language translation, and the carousel now automatically dips down on mobile devices for the maximum viewing area.

Once again, Happy Holidays to you and thank you so much for your continued support. Give us a call or email us with any questions that you may have. If you would like guidance as to how to implement or market any of these new items please don’t hesitate to ask. All of these powerful marketing tools are what make you look your best and secure the most business in your market. As we kick off the new year, look for amazing things to continue coming from RTV and prepare yourself for a very special announcement!

Sincerely,

Team RTV

Virtual Tour Software & National Photography Services

866-947-8687

 

 

Virtual Tour Software Updates – 1080 Adaptive Streaming, 360 Video Support, & More!

April 24, 2019

Spring is officially here and with it comes blue skies, green grass and for our customers & followers, it also comes with a LOT of virtual tour software updates.  We’ve been trying to find the time to get a change log, blog and software update video out but with so much going on it kept getting put on the back burner.  Here we are now with a larger than usual software update email for you all.  Let’s get started!

Those of you that would prefer to watch a video overview of this update feel free to watch the video below.

All others read on!

Adaptive 1080 Video Streaming: We’re beyond excited to officially announce the release of our 1080 Adaptive Video Streaming to our virtual tour software that just went live here in April. Customers that utilize our virtual tour hosting system for aerial drone photography and home walkthrough videos will LOVE this update the most! RTV’s adaptive streaming technology is like no other being used in our industry at this time. Not only is the video crisp and clear across all devices and tablets but it’s also very fast loading and streamed to you in 1080 quality.  This is a huge improvement over our older 720 technology that did not load as fast, play as smoothly, and autoplay on devices.

Users will notice right away that the videos will autoplay on devices without the need to press a “Play” button.  We have also introduced an innovative “Play Head” that allows users to interact, skip ahead, or go back to key locations in the video.  Locations within the video are identified by using preview thumbnails very similar to that of “Netflix” and other advanced streaming services. Those of you with a keen eye will also notice that we have added in a nice transition as you go to and from video scenes. I the previous version, our virtual tour player added in a black empty space that did not flow with the rest of the production.  The newly introduced transition will also be customizable soon with the release of our new Theming Update that is coming out next!

Finally, our customers can rest assured that anyone on a fast 3G and higher connection will be able to watch the video in 1080.  Those on slower connections will be served up a smaller 720 or 480 video size.  Our new Adaptive streaming technology allows us to serve up a video experience for everyone in every corner of the web! We look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing your beautiful productions come through here this summer in 1080!  Please note that video files uploaded to Fusion prior to this update will need to be removed and re-uploaded / re-encoded to take advantage of this streaming update.  If you see the small white “Gear” on your virtual tour to select a quality you can rest assured that your video is new enough to take advantage of our streaming technology.

See our adaptive streaming technology in action by viewing these virtual tours – https://tours.bluelavamedia.com/164406  and https://tours.robertharveyphoto.com/809285

New 360 Video Support: With the release of adaptive video streaming we thought we would surprise you all by adding in support for 360 videos.  360 video is an up and coming technology that is currently not being used as much as traditional video but has the potential to gain popularity as time goes on. We are anxiously waiting to see what our customers will do with this unique technology.  If you add 360 Video into your productions please be sure to send your creative work to us so we can take a look at how you’re utilizing 360 video in our virtual tour software.

New Email Traffic Reports: While we were not planning on overhauling the E-mail version of the Seller’s Report this last month we were forced to because of changes that Google made to their API.  We completely revamped how our weekly virtual tour traffic reports look as well as how they are sent out.  The new reports will send 25 times faster on an upgraded database and will show up in agents inboxes on time and with an entirely new look and feel.  We’re very happy with the new colors, stats, and layout.  Tell us what you think – https://fusion.realtourvision.com/report/trafficreport-email.php?tourid=881108

Faster Video & Image Processing: Those of you that upload videos or panoramas to our server have already been commenting on how fast the videos and panoramas are processing these days.  That’s because we’ve greatly improved the back end threading that handles these processes as well as migrated all of the “heavy lifting” to another server.  With this intense processing removed from the management server, you don’t feel the weight of hundreds of others creating virtual tours at the same time, and you’ll feel an overall boost in the virtual tour manager speed.

Lightning-Fast Media Deletion: Image processing is not the only thing that we’ve made super fast on the tour manager.  Now when you’re in your media manager and you want to remove a panorama, a still photo or a video you’ll notice that you can delete those unwanted scenes instantly.  We’re very happy to announce to you that there is no more waiting ten to twenty seconds to remove a batch of images or a video file.

Improved Spherical Panorama Playback: In preparation for taking the RTV system to a full-on “Walkthrough Virtual Tour” type system we were aware of some playback issues when loading a spherical panorama.  Those issues have been resolved and now the playback in both the Fusion Experience and Fusion Slim virtual tour players are seamless and without a black space or uncomfortable delay which was present in the previous build. Those of you that would like to see a Walkthrough Virtual Tour on RTV’s platform check out this winery virtual tour that we recently photographed – https://fusion.realtourvision.com/847718

New QR Code Generator: Our new QR code generator works much like our previous one did except now we have greatly extended the upper limit of the QR code generated to be several thousand pixels tall. We have made this change to allow for the printing of a QR code on larger signs and billboards.

Buttons Now Tour Options: By popular demand, we have made renamed and relocated the “Buttons” section of the tour manager.  This section is now called Tour Options and is located under the “Manage” section. We left the word “Buttons” next to it for the time being while you get used to its new name and new locations but please be advised that we will soon be calling this section “Tour Options”.

We live to program new virtual tour software features for you every few weeks. Stay tuned for more AMAZING updates to come in 2019!!  Thank you all for your dedication to our brand and loyalty.  You Stand Out with RTV!

Sincerely,

Team RTV

Order a virtual tour – 866-947-8687

https://www.RealTourVision.com

Virtual Tour Software Updates – Final Push 2018

December 28, 2018

Happy New Year from Team RTV! This year we were able to release a record number of wonderful virtual tour software enhancements and time savers to our already robust system. Looking back, we made new virtual tour technology announcements every month of the year! We are wrapping up 2018 today by announcing several new updates to our system that are outlined for you below.

Virtual Tour System Updates

Please take a moment and watch a video overview of our virtual tour software updates here: https://youtu.be/aJmUa-mUImA  and you can also read about each update in detail below.

Fusion Virtual Tour Manager Updates:

• RTV says goodbye to Adobe Flash – While our virtual tours have been Flash-free for quite some time now, our back end (Fusion Manager) had some remaining Flash elements that simply had to go. We are happy to announce that as of December of 2018 we no longer have any Flash elements in the RTV system!

• All-in-one HTML 5 Scene Editor – Customers will notice a nice productivity boost the next time they use our new HTML 5 scene editor. The days of having to use the Still Photos Editor, followed by the Panorama Editor, followed by the Hot Spot Editor are over. Our new Scene Editor combines most of our editors into one, which allows you to do all of these things from one, easy to use, Editor. You can access the new Scene Editor from your Media Manager by double-clicking on any of your Still Photos, Video Clips, or Panoramic Photos. This double-click action will then open up new Scene Editor allowing you to quickly choose a video clip thumbnail, adjust Ken Burns and still photo calibration settings, add Hot Spots, and adjust panoramic settings. You will also like that we now allow you to quickly navigate back to the Media Manager from within the new Scene Editor.

• New HTML 5 Hot Spot Editor – For those of you that like to create “Walkthrough” style virtual tours and utilize Hot Spots, you’ll love our new and improved HTML 5 Hot Spot Editor. It’s not only faster and easier to use, but it’s also “Smart” and steps you through the process of adding Hot Spots to scenes. If you create panoramas for your virtual tours and do not use Hot Spots, we would like to encourage you to try out the new Hot Spot Editor. Just click the “Plus” symbol and let our New Hot Spot Editor guide you through the process. It’s fast and very easy to use bringing RTV one step closer to full virtual walkthrough creations.

• New HTML 5 Cloud Recorder – RTV’s Cloud Recorder is now 100% HTML 5. The Cloud Recorder allows your customers do their own voice overs on their virtual tours without the need for audio recording and editing software. If you’ve never used (or allowed your customers to use) the cloud recorder, we encourage you to give it a try. Reach out to RTV’s technical support team if you don’t know how to give your customers access to your tour manager, and we’ll step you through the process of granting user level access as well as using the Cloud Recorder.

• New HTML 5 Floor Plan Editor – We have been seeing an uptick in the number of floor plans stored on tour system which means that our customers like our new “3 Way” Floor Plans which we launched at the beginning of this year. You’ll all be happy to know that our Floor Plan Editor is now HTML 5 and will also one day soon be a part of the All-in-One Scene Editor.

• Fusion Navigation Changes – As you poke through the Fusion virtual tour system during your next build, you will likely take notice that some things have been moved around and relocated to places where they make a bit more sense and are more convenient throughout the tour creation process. As we continue to enhance the Fusion virtual tour system, you can expect much more organization such as this to occur, and we will always let you know when it does.

Log into your Fusion virtual tour system to take a peek at all the new enhancements – https://manage.realtourvision.com

Thank you once again for your support and we hope that you are as excited about the New Year as we are. Get ready for HTTPS tours as well as video streaming 2.0 as the New Year kicks off. See you next year!

Sincerely,

Team RTV

RTV, Inc

Virtual Tour Software & National Photography Services

Stand Out Today – 866-947-8687

www.RealTourVision.com

Feel free to browse some of our virtual tour software videos from the past:

Real Estate Virtual Tour Software by RTV, Inc – FREE TRIAL

Virtual Tour Hardware & Camera Setup

Free Virtual Software Trial by RTV, Inc

Virtual Tour Software Updates – Lots of Time Savers & What’s to Come

November 30, 2018

Latest Virtual Tour Software Updates for RTV

  • EasyMLS Updates – We have made EasyMLS even easier and faster for our users. Less buttons to click now for both USA and Canadian users.
  • Photographers Creating Orders – By popular demand, you can now permit your virtual tour photographers to place their own orders and create tours from within Fusion. When your virtual tour photographers create a tour, you are given a notification and can keep track of their activity.
  • Photographer Login – We’re very happy to let you know that you can now log directly into your virtual tour photographers account from your master virtual tour system account. This is a HUGE time saver for those of you with a large photography team.
  • Additional Agent / Owner Permissions – When you grant them permission, both agents and owners are now allowed to log into your private labeled login (http://login.BlueLaVaMedia.com) and delete tours. Remember that you will need to grant this permission and it is off by default!
  • Video Ripper Improvements – The video ripper that can be found under the “Video Promotion” section of your virtual tour manager now rips the videos with the audio tracks in the correct order. Consider using the video ripper to create short “Social” videos in addition to your longer YouTube versions. It’s easy and a great money maker!
  • Video Delivery Update – For those of you wishing that you could find a way to easily send your customers your drone video, or home walkthrough video directly through Fusion we are happy to tell you that you can! Check your deliverables section for both your created .mp4 video from our Video Ripper as well as the ability for you to send your customer any videos that you have added into your virtual tour production.
  • Image Delivery Engine Update – We are very happy to let you know that you can now send your virtual tour customers their images in a zip file named one of three ways! Our Image Delivery Engine will now allow you to deliver your images to your customer using your scene sort order, the name you gave your images or you can choose to use your own scene title. Choose your favorite and most convenient naming convention and keep things easy on your customers with these new improvements to the RTV Image Delivery Engine!

Virtual Tour Player Updates

  • Improved Tour SEO – We know that the better a tour ranks in the SERPS the more views it will get, so we stand committed to making sure that your tours will get noticed by the search engines. Our new improved Tour Tags and META should give you a noticeable boost in both MacroSEO site and virtual tour ranking. Remember that your tours MUST be linked onto a site with “Follow” tags for the search engine spiders to pick them up and index them. We encourage you all to use the MacroSEO site to help accomplish this and be sure to blog all of your tours. See www.TourGrandTraverse.com for pointers.

Thanks for your continued support!

Team RTV

Virtual Tour Software & National Photography Services

Order a Virtual Tour – 866-947-8687

Lot of New Virtual Tour System Updates!

November 10, 2018

Hello RTV fans! We’re very excited to roll out several new updates to the Fusion Virtual Tour Software Manager that are outlined below. Most of these updates have already been announced in the Fusion “Latest Changes” log inside your virtual tour manager, but we like to blog about them too just in case you missed any during the busy work week!

  • New Tour Deliverables Section – We are now live with our all new Deliverables section of your virtual tour manager. The new deliverables section offer a better workflow and now allows you to send everything that you might need to send your customer in one (1) email VS two or three. We also reformatted the email that is sent out to your customer making the title of each item more customer friendly and easier to understand. We encourage you to send yourself your virtual tour deliverable links and review the changes that have taken place, so you are prepared to explain the slight changes to your customers. Finally, you will notice that the image compile is faster than before. The image delivery engine will also remind you if you forget to compile your HD image package before you send to your customer. If you update your virtual tour with new images the image delivery engine will also encourage you to re-compile your ZIP file. Lots of goodies here team that help make your life a little easier.
  • New Improved Video Ripper – We have made several updates to our Video Ripper which takes your entire virtual tour production and creates an mp4 video. The new video has added the Agent / Owner contact information in the upper right for the entire video playback VS just having it there in the beginning and in the end. Lots more happening to our video promotion section real soon! See a live demo here – https://youtu.be/G_6aGGW5hMQ
  • Manager Video Player Now HTML 5 – We have fully converted our manager video player to an HTML 5 format for you. You use the manager video player to preview your uploaded videos as well as to choose a video thumbnail. The HTML 5 video player works MUCH better than its flash predecessor!
  • EasyMLS Now HTML 5 – Flash is no longer needed to utilize our EasyMLS feature. We recently made some updates to our EasyMLS system for the USA and Canada. We hope that you are enjoying the time savings this feature presents!
  • New Autumn and Fall based Themes and Home Screen Backgrounds – Several of our providers have been requesting that we add in some themes and home screen backgrounds. We think you’ll love the new home screen backgrounds and themes that we’ve created for you. Enjoy!
  • Panorama Editor Now HTML 5 – In our expedited focus to rid Fusion of all traces of Flash we are proud to announce to you that our Panorama Editor is now 100% HTML 5! The new Panorama editor works much better than the previous flash based version.
  • New HTML 5 Tour Embed Code – The programming team has completely overhauled the way our deliverables section creates your virtual tour embed code. Now you are given three useful options for embedding a virtual tour depending on the situation. You can choose a fully responsive solution, a “Fill the Container” option, or you can manually set a specific height and width in percentage or pixels. It’s quite handy and all in HTML 5!
  • GoDaddy Domain Registration Fixes – Last month the team implemented the new Godaddy API which gives us a bit more control over how we register your single property website domains. The new API, however, fails to set the forwarding and masking all the time at the point of sale which leaves some domains registered but not pointing to your production. The team has now created a queue system which holds the Godaddy connection until we can enable the masking and forwarding successfully.
  • New NTREIS MLS Link – NTREIS (Dallas / Ft. Worth Board of Realtors) recently asked us to change our approved non-branded base URL from https://fusion.realtourvision.com/idx/TOURID to https://idx.realtourvision.com/TOURID Those living in the state of TX will have the NTREIS switch on by default under “Settings” – “Syndication”. Having this switch turned on will give you the new approved NTREIS non-branded link under your SECURE RTV LINKS tab in deliverables. Those in Texas that are not creating tours for the NTREIS MLS can feel free to turn this switch off if they like. Having this switch turned on ONLY changes the non-branded Secure RTV Link in deliverables. The link works exactly the same as the other non-branded link. The only difference is the URL.

Our push to convert the remaining Flash components within the Fusion Virtual Tour Manager is nearly complete. We are hoping to take the new HTML 5 Hot Spot Editor and the new HTML 5 Floor Plan Editor live this coming week. Fingers crossed!! Once that is complete the only remaining Flash component of the RTV Fusion Virtual Tour Software Manager will be the Cloud Recorder. It’s been a long two months since we set out to rid Fusion of Flash and we’re nearly finished. We’re very proud to have the support and business of so many successful virtual tour photographers around the world that help us keep the development moving at full speed! Our new “Fusion Themes”, Video Streaming and several other updates are still on track to roll out before 2019 so be sure you stay tuned.

Enjoy the new virtual tour software updates!

Sincerely,

Team RTV

 

Virtual Tour Software & National Photography Services

Order a virtual tour – 866-947-8687