The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

I'm a subscriber and proud of it too. I'm sure it helps stab maintain the site as well as removing the ads. Heartily recommended.

Do you have to pay with credit cards? I'm not a credit card person, so I hope there's at least one other way to pay.

^ There's the best reason to subscribe.

Are the sneak previews short clips of the upcoming vids or more than that? Because it would be cool if they had additional content not shown in the released vids like bloopers, setups or unedited parts of the video.

It's not quite the same thing as having a subscription. Premium members get to use the extra screen real estate for content. The ad blockers I've seen just replace the ads with an unusable white rectangle. Subscribers also enjoy watching premium videos (such as those on Brotherhood flags) free from in-video commercials.

Subscribers to THB generally fall into two categories: Players who sign up for one month to watch the AC2 flag videos but don't post on the forums, and site regulars who buy an annual subscription to show their support. We don't publicly distinguish free members from premium members like some other sites do (e.g. deviantART). We understand that some members are students or unemployed and not able to help financially. It's not our intention to shame folks into subscribing. Those who can't afford to join can help out in other ways. Look at it like this: we don't make any advertising revenue from premium members.

It's a concept we haven't fully developed. Initially we would share rough drafts of works in progress with certain members. Their feedback would help us produce a more polished final draft. It was less than ideal because these people would sometimes only watch the rough draft and not the final one (since they had "already seen it"). They deserved better.

We considered releasing our "major" videos to only premium members for an initial run of say 1 to 3 months. After that it would become available to everyone, like a movie going from the theaters to DVD. This idea was never implemented.

What do you guys think of Aurel's idea to have "extras" such as bloopers?

I would love bloopers as extras. I hesitate to ask for more since you do so much already.

I wouldn't mind getting DVD collections of each game in the series by stab and/or ian. Or something similar to that idea.

^ wow. even tho you can get it for free on youtube in a relatively organized fashion?

It's just an idea lol

There's some merit to having AC videos on DVD. Namely audio and video quality. Ian and I master our videos in standard-definition which doesn't sound so great but it's better than what you see online. Encoding a video for the internet knocks the bitrate down to something streamable like half a megabit per second.

The immediate downside is no YouTube annotations. All those spot shadows and witty one-liners vanish. Like Ian said, another downside is organization (although I would argue that our video catalog is better indexed and searchable here on THB than on YouTube).

Thanks for brainstorming new ideas. I actually thought this one was pretty good.

Well if this job kept on past summer, I'd gladly be a subscriber. I was just seeing if there were any other perks.

That's what audio commentary is for.

Then again, sometimes leaving it to the viewer's imagination is better. Some people can't get out exactly what they want the witty phrase to sound like.

Wait! After we get the new logo(s), I'd be willing to buy some THB merchandise (shirt, hats, etc).

Example: a t-shirt that says "Ian and I are the stalkers..." or "bada stib, bada stab" or whatever Ian's "about" section says at the time or something like that.

I hope they were planning to make merchandise in the future (they might have been joking about it).

Well I don't see what's so funny about a pair of briefs that says "'Pushing it' gets girls pregnant"...wait

Merchandise would be just beautiful. I would personally love a THB mug

If there was a THB t-shirt, I would wear it with great pride-itude.

No joke. We'd like to make THB merchandise available to our members. The two things we need are:

• Good designs
• Enough demand to justify the printing/production costs

Printing T-shirts etc. is best done in bulk. I don't want to get stuck with a large inventory of unsold merchandise. Once we have some good designs I will take a poll to gauge how many people would want to buy shirts, hats, or mugs.

I think we already have some sweet designs in the "Artwork needed" forum by our new member. Obviously just "THB" would suffice for almost any type of merchandise.

I knew this topic would get something done.

some of the people live on the other side of the world

shipping something from America to the Netherlands cost at least 100 euro´s

A shirt that says, "Last person to read this shirt wins!" or any clothing/merchandise variation.

Almost forgot about this topic. My hopes for The Top Ten Discoveries in Assassins Creed were to reach out to people who would otherwise miss out on AC in depth (actually my hopes were no less then us getting rich and famous). I was hoping we could try to impement some stuff and see how it goes. I like the idea of first showing rough drafts of videos to premium members, then releasing the actual video to them, then to THB members, then maybe to Youtube after that. Some sites do that, post it there first then to Youtube. It would be more motivation for people to go on THB. Plus since I currently have to upload the unedited videos to Youtube first I could easily make a rough draft (thanks to the editing option on Youtube).

Another issue concerning the videos. Some videos may get deleted from Youtube. A few examples are the Ezio Christina music video (because of copyright) and Altair92's videos (account deleted?). To avoid this problem maybe the videos could be hosted locally, and also with ads.

I look forward to all your thoughts on this. Stabguy gets the last word though.

and my sound is gone on the Connor - Bridewell Prison video (thanks, Metallica) haha