In this week’s Mass High Tech, Denise DeMurcie writes a column based on an interview with me, in which she points out the differences among the major presidential candidates when it comes to web video.  The bottom line: Barack Obama is way out front in using modern web video tools, John McCain is lagging well behind, and Hillary Clinton is somewhere in the middle.

Denise’s interview with me is published as a podcast on her website, and goes into far more detail than any of my blog posts about why and how we created the internet TV channel for the Mitt Romney for President campaign.  Mitt TV is widely knowledged as the first comprehensive video channel for a presidential campaign.

Both the Romney and Obama campaigns understood the power of video not only to get the message out but also to attract, engage, and actuate supporters on the main campaign website.  Without disclosing specific numbers, we found that when we could use web video to bring a viewer to the campaign website and call them to action, the payoff — in terms of contributions, volunteer sign-ups, referrals, event attendance, etc. — was orders of magnitude more than the cost of serving up the video.  That’s why we favored video on our own website over the many clips we posted on YouTube.  And that’s why by the end of the Romney campaign we had more than 400 video clips online and literally thousands of in-links to Mitt TV.

The campaigns have been waking up to this potential slowly, and some of them have been tuning in even more slowly to the modern tools of internet TV channel design and implementation.  By the 2012 campaign cycle, this will all seem like old hat…but for now, the candidates are definitely on different tracks and most certainly achieving different results.  It may be pure coincidence that the candidates’ fundraising performance correlates with their sophistication on internet video, but our experience suggests that sophisticated use of web video certainly has an impact on keeping an active, vibrant base of supporters who visit often and want to stay involved.

For anyone who still harbors doubts that internet video has gone mainstream, consider the new statistics for January, 2008, just released by internet traffic measurement service comScore:

More than 139 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 206 minutes per person viewing online video in January.

…

More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video.

Also, according to the comScore study:

• The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes; and
• The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.

These numbers are stunning even for an internet video content booster like me.  It suggests that internet video has penetrated far beyond the teen and twentysomething crowd.  And it suggests that, with broadband adoption becoming near-universal at home and work and more than three-quarters of internet users not only ABLE to watch video online but actually WATCHING it, we’ve now reached the point where internet video is not only attractive as part of any website design, but it will soon be expected.

Despite the fact that vast majority of the projects we produce are destined for the world wide web, a number of them still need to go to DVD.  And the DVD option is getting even more interesting now that we’re starting to produce Blu-Ray discs with stunning-quality high-definition video.

Our friends over at Discmakers, the folks who make the DVD duplicating equipment we use at DigiNovations, have put out a valuable tip sheet containing a lot of the things you’ll want to think about as you’re preparing to bring your project to a creative shop like ours to turn into an engaging, spectacular DVD.  As they point out:

From the time your independent film is in the can, your post-production efforts are likely to include thoughts of DVD, whether your output is a feature film, documentary, training course, marketing infomercial, or animated short. Though you may have mastered the intricacies and challenges of set lighting, lenses, audio capture, and non-linear editing, getting your work onto DVD requires attention to some technical considerations that may be unfamiliar to you.

So if your project is destined for DVD — and especially if you want a creatively-authored DVD that looks like a Hollywood hit — then click on “From DV to DVD: Tips for Getting Outstanding Results”.  And feel free to ask us about any questions you might have.

If you haven’t seen it, click through to this article from the New York Times entitled “Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam”.  In it, correspondent Steve Lohr notes that video on the web is a key factor driving internet demand to the point that — absent a huge increase in capacity — demand for bandwidth could approach capacity by 2011.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

The article notes, correctly, that the technology to compress and optimize flow of information around the net — effectively increasing the capacity of the internet infrastructure — is improving very rapidly as well.  And even if capacity comes under strain, the effects are likely to be felt as “brown-outs” rather than blackouts — that is, slow-downs due to congestion, concentrated in certain regions and dayparts.

Nonetheless, it is a reminder once again that we are at this time beneficiaries of a perfect storm of benefits: the need to fill over-built bandwidth from the internet boom keeps access prices down, and the land-grab for customers and eyeballs by video content services is keeping video hosting costs down (or even free).  Those factors will disappear over the next few years, and we’ll start to see the true economic cost of bandwidth and hosting reflected in the pricing.

Those of us with a long-range view for our content initiatives need to keep the long-term economics in mind, even as we’re enjoying the short-term benefits of a pricing boon.

The NBC/News Corporation joint online video venture Hulu is open to the public today, and what an impressive first release it is!

The service has been in beta test for months, and invitations have been difficult to come by.  But now, anyone can check in and sign up.  And just about every major NBC and Fox network program is there — not just the current program, but also the archives!  The only content you’ll find here is professionally-produced content.  No home-baked Mentos-and-Diet-Coke hacks, and no LonelyGirl laments.  This is the first and best real test of an advertising-financed aggregation service built totally around professional content.

Here are some early impressions:

• Once again, this is an affirmation of how great Flash Video is in providing a wonderful viewing experience.  I’ve written before here that for purposes of our work, the video format wars are over (though I realize that Microsoft is trying to say “not so fast” with its budding Silverlight offering).  But for now, Flash Video gives us content producers a wonderful, high-quality viewing experience on a computer.  When encoded from the original live material, the quality is quite stunning (compare this version of the Saturday Night Live Clinton-Obama 3am phone call sketch to what you might see posted on YouTube, for example):

• As I’ve just illustrated, the power of freely allowing video to be embedded in other sites is a dramatic multiplier on distribution.
• HD video on the web is definitely coming along, as you can see from the movie trailer clip below which is encoded int HD at 1280x720 pixels — essentially the same as a 720p high-definition television set.  And the quality is stunning when played full-screen on my 1440x920 laptop display, with no visible scale-up artifacts.  However, the bandwidth demands are very high — at least 2.5 megabits per second.  I get that on my brand-new Verizon FIOS connection at home, but I’d never try it in the office, where our T1 line delivers half that speed on a good day.  (If you’ve got the bandwidth, check it out at http://www.hulu.com/hd/12589, but make sure you ask it to play full-screen.)
• I’m noting, too, that Fox has not quite gone all-in on its content.  Shows like “24”, that derive a lot of revenue from DVD sales, have only partial libraries available for free on the web.  (Seasons 1 and 6 of “24” are available, while Seasons 2 through 5 are only available on DVD.)
• Still, the budding network — even in test — is illustrating Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” theory.  Even in its limited test period with tens of thousands of clips and programs online, 80% of the content was viewed at least once per week, according to the folks at Hulu.
• Finally, a portability option is going to be essential.  I’ve gotten hooked on video programming — particularly video podcasts, including news programming like “Meet the Press” and “NBC Nightly News”, and groundbreaking series like the TED Talks.  But rarely do I want to watch them on my internet-connected computer — I carry them with me on airplanes, in the car, and in doctors’ waiting rooms.  But until someone comes up with the essential feedback loop to be able to report on who’s watched which ads in an ad-supported network, the portability barrier will be a difficult one for content-owners to leap.

All in all, a promising first release.  And some healthy competition for Apple iTunes, who once threatened to put a stranglehold on the market.

Here’s a link to a presentation given today (March 8, 2008) at the Pro Video 2008 show in Easton, Massachusetts.  It pretty much captures my current thinking and advice to video professionals about preparing video for the web and building internet TV channels:

Download the PDF file (Requires Adobe Reader)

I thought everyone might enjoy this inside look at Brightcove, put together for Boston.com by the Boston Globe’s technology business editor (and my high school and college classmate!) D.C. Denison…

And the ability to embed this video directly into the Web Video Expert blog illustrates another important point: the way in which video can now move out of its original context into entirely new settings, just by clicking on a “Get Code” button and pasting the HTML code into the right place on your web page.  This, of course, can cuts both way because the farther it gets from the source, the farther it gets from benefitting the rest of your site if you intend your video content to be a magnet to attract site visitors.  But for those with a message to spread, it’s great news, as you can find many more “front doors” to your content than you ever imagined.

As a video content producer in New England, I’d gotten a pretty good sense that something special was going on in Boston over the last couple of years when it comes to Internet/TV convergence.  After all, innovators like Brightcove, PermissionTV, and Maven Networks are all right here in our back yards, along with Akemai, the parent of one of the most important enabling technologies.

But an article this morning in the online newsletter Xconomy by Wade Rousch (click for “The Greater Boston Internet Video Cluster”) really brought it home by attempting to list all the companies providing platforms, tools, and enabling technologies in this space.  In Rousch’s words:

Boston may take a back seat to Los Angeles and New York as a locus for TV, film, and video production, but it’s front and center when it comes to the array of technologies that go into publishing and monetizing video content on the Internet.

…

Now an increasing fraction of traditional TV and movie content—along with a huge tidal wave of brand-new content, much of it generated by consumers themselves—is available over the Internet.

…

It turns out that a lot of the companies building this technology are right here in Boston.

Because it’s so central to the future of media, this is an industry cluster that deserves to be spotlighted.

Rousch’s list — which he openly admits is a work in progress — identifies 28 Boston-area companies involved in the internet TV space, and I can think of a half-dozen more whose business plans and prototypes I’ve seen but are still operating in “stealth mode”.

This is exciting news for both us as content producers and for our clients, as there will be lots of opportunities to try new technologies to engage, inform, and activate viewers and customers.  And once again it’s great to see Boston re-establishing itself as a hub in a very important new domain.

One of the statistics that’s often used to promote the use of video on websites these days comes in the form of an old marketing and education aphorism.  It has many forms, but goes something like this:

People generally remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, and 50% of what they hear and see.

There are literally hundreds of variations on this quote on the web today, and it’s actually quite amusing to go through some of them, such as this one and this one and this one and this one and this one.  And often there are research footnotes to back it up.

So of course, when I wanted to use these statistics in putting together compelling (but accurate) materials on why companies and organizations should enhance their websites with video, I wanted to use as accurate a quotation as possible.  So I started trying to trace the quote back to its original source, and found that it was like trying to hold mercury in my hand.  Every time it appeared I was getting close to the original research, it would slip through my fingers and I’d find myself at a dead end — or worse, an infinite loop.

Now, thanks to a recent analysis I discovered by learning-and-performance consultant Will Thalheimer Ph.D., I know why: the original research doesn’t exist and the statistical conclusions were made up and perpetuated along the way.  Here is an excerpt from his excellent online article, “People Remember 10%, 20%…Oh Really?” (followed by more in his follow-up “One More Time”):

People do NOT remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear, etc. That information, and similar pronouncements are fraudulent. Moreover, general statements on the effectiveness of learning methods are not credible—-learning results depend on too many variables to enable such precision. Unfortunately, this bogus information has been floating around our field for decades, crafted by many different authors and presented in many different configurations, including bastardizations of Dale’s Cone.

…

The percentages, and the graph in particular, have been passed around in our field from reputable person to reputable person. The people who originally created the fabrications are to blame for getting this started, but there are clearly many people willing to bend the information to their own devices. Kinnamon’s (2002) investigation found that Treichler’s percentages have been modified in many ways, depending on the message the shyster wants to send. Some people have changed the relative percentages. Some have improved Treichler’s grammar. Some have added categories to make their point. For example, one version of these numbers says that people remember 95% of the information they teach to others.

All of which reminds me of the old line: “82.6 percent of all statistics used to prove a point (including this one) are made up on the spot.”

In rejecting the bogus statistics, however, it’s important not to discard the larger point.  There’s no doubt in my mind that a well-produced film or video program conveys experiences and impressions in a way that is much easier to retain and internalize than, in many cases, the written word.  Film and video is all about experience and emotion and hearing things in people’s own words.  Human beings are simply “wired” to retain experiences that touch so many senses and emotions.  In other words, people respond to good storytelling.

You might not be able to measure it with statistics, but every day we see viewers of our films moved to action and we hear from viewers who remember tiny details that touched off some emotion or memory.

The power of visual storytelling is indisputable.  We just may not be able to put numbers on it all the time.

In a recent column for Mass High Tech, Denise DeMurcie writes about how internet TV is beginning to change how companies build relationships with customers through their websites.

A great example of this is what Transamerica Retirement Management has recently started doing with their SecurePath by Transamerica website.  A major feature of the website is a series of video programs that address issues and concerns for baby boomers in transition to the later stages of their life.  Here’s what they say about the series on the site:

Sometimes, the journey is just as interesting and exciting as the destination. That’s exactly what you’ll find reflected in clips from our Video Library — stories about Boomers and their experiences transitioning into retirement. We’ll bring you a different subject in the series each and every month. Last month, we explored issues related to staying healthy. This month, we examine different housing options. Please visit the library often and enjoy upcoming subjects on budgeting, travel, and more!

The content Transamerica started out with was repurposed from a public television series called “Boomers: Redefining Life After Fifty,” which was broadcast in 2006.  Transamerica selected more than thirty two- to three-minute segments from the TV series, licensed the content from the show producers, recorded custom introductions and closes, and put the series out one month at a time, inviting viewers to come back again and again to the SecurePath website to view new segments.  (The team at DigiNovations helped get Transamerica set up with their video on the web, and we manage their Brightcove web video channel on their behalf.)

Satisfied with that first experiment, the company has recently commissioned entirely new video content to put on the site, such as this interview segment on creativity in retirement years with Dr. Gene Cohen.

The idea of using fresh content to bring customers and prospects back again and again to a website is a familiar one.  The innovation here is using video content as the draw, and hosting it on a content management system that makes it easy to manage and present the clips in a high-quality format that’s viewable across a wide variety of computers and web browsers.

It’s an idea whose time has come, and Transamerica has broken out as a leader of this particular pack.

I had a chance to review my web server logs last night (what else are you going to do when it’s snowing another foot in New Hampshire?), and to my surprise two of the top six search terms that were used to discover the “Web Video Expert” blog were “brightcove cost” and “brightcove pricing”.  There is obviously a lot of interest around this subject — enough so that literally hundreds of people a month are coming to us, trying to find the answer to the question: What does Brightcove cost?

For those of you who don’t know what Brightcove is, it’s an amazingly powerful and flexible platform for publishing Internet TV Channels on the web.  It has revolutionized the way we think about video on the internet, and has had a dramatic and positive impact on the effectiveness of web video for dozens of DigiNovations’ clients.

Yes, there’s a free version of Brightcove available if you’re willing to put up with ads on your videos and channels, placed by Brightcove.  But we’re talking here about the full-blown, fully-featured premium Brightcove publishing platform — the same internet TV channel used by everyone from the National Geographic Channel to the Barack Obama for President campaign…not to mention clients of ours like Sacred Heart University.

The problem with trying to answer the question, though, is two things:

• It depends; and
• It’s a secret that Brightcove is trying its best to protect.

It depends, of course, on the scale of the application — the number of video streams served per month, the size of each of those streams, and the amount of customization you want to apply.  So there’s no easy price list to look up — you’ve got to fill out a contact form and have a sales representative call you to size you up and assess your needs.

But beyond that, Brightcove has clamped down a veil of confidentiality about its price list by contractually obliging its customers (that would be us) to keep their pricing confidential.

Suffice to say, though, that despite its initial efforts to offer a “Brightcove Standard” product that would be affordable for every business, department, school, and not-for-profit organization, Brightcove has now reversed itself and is content with cream-skimming with the big media companies (take a look at their selected customer list) and has abandoned for now the strategy of empowering everyone with inexpensive, ad-free internet TV channels.

Brightcove quietly pulled its small-customer offering (priced under $100 a month) off the market within a couple of months of launching it, and now customers who want to buy the full Brightcove platform from Brightcove pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to do so.

On the one hand, this isn’t terribly surprising.  Despite its big, bold look, Brightcove is a relatively small organization with modest venture funding…and word has it that the support burdens of trying to get thousands of small companies up on Brightcove were a nightmare.

But it is a disappointment, and leaves plenty of room for a competitor to sweep into the middle market.  After all, I still believe that internet TV channels will be a common part of every company and organization’s website within the next five years, and right now Brightcove is simply not affordable for anyone except big customers — at least when bought directly from Brightcove.

All of that said, there is another approach to getting the benefits of Brightcove for smaller applications.  Web video production companies like DigiNovations are set up to design, implement, and manage great internet TV channels on the Brightcove platform for smaller customers.  And until Brightcove figures out a lower-priced middle-market offering, that will be the only way the vast majority of companies and organizations can take advantage of this powerful new web video tool.

First in a series, based on Ten Lessons from Mitt TV.

In this, the first presidential campaign cycle in which internet video has taken center stage, the candidates seem to have developed a love-hate relationship with YouTube, and both emotions come with good reason.  To be sure, YouTube has brought a great deal to each and every campaign, but those benefits have come at a cost — not all of which is readily apparent — and have left YouTube (and its parent, Google) with something nobody else has.

A Free Lunch?

Early in the 2008 cycle, after the Romney campaign had launched Mitt TV and when other campaigns were scrambling to figure out how they could catch up, the folks at YouTube stepped in with a remarkable offer.  YouTube offered each campaign a free “channel,” and promised to protect those channels as an advertising-free zone.

Romney for President YouTube ChannelEvery single campaign accepted the offer by late spring of 2007, and the online video primary battle was joined.  From Obama to Paul, everyone had a free channel on YouTube, which gave the campaign a semi-controlled environment in which all the “official” video clips of the campaign could be posted, and one of those clips could be “featured” at the top of the channel.

Free of charge?  No ads?  Control of what clips are displayed in the channel?  So far, this sounded like a pretty good deal.  And it’s no surprise that the campaigns jumped on board with both feet.  After all, a successful campaign might expect as many as 100 million video clip viewings during the entire campaign cycle, and if they can save a penny a clip by using free hosting on YouTube, then they could spend a million bucks on other things like charter jets and lawn signs.  And more importantly, the campaigns can get exposure to the large and enthusiastic audience of YouTubers and become part of the conversation among a new generation of web participants.

A no-brainer?  On one level, yes,  But YouTube is also a venue that needs to be approached with caution.  To see why, look at what YouTube is getting out of the deal.

Behavioral Targeting: A Key Motive for YouTube/Google

To be sure, a big motive for YouTube was to find a place for itself as a more serious venue for political dialog than as a merely a showplace for Mentos-and-Diet-Coke hackers — especially after its acquisition by Google.  But a more important motivation came from YouTube’s interest in behavioral targeting, and the desire to identify and tag every possible visitor to the site with their political interests, based on what clips they viewed.

Here’s how behavioral targeting works in this context.  Every time a campaign directed traffic to a YouTube clip, it was allowing that viewer to be identified as, for example, an “Obama-interested” or “McCain-interested” viewer.  And while they were exposed to no advertising while actually viewing the candidates’ channels, the viewers are now being served up — by YouTube and, presumably, by its parent Google — into premium advertising packages marketed to political parties, 527 special-interest interest groups and PAC’s, rival campaigns, and others interested in targeting fans of one candidate or another while they’re going other things in YouTube, Google, or its affiliates.

Google has been working on behavioral targeting for quite some time, and politics seems to be a great place to test the concepts — large national audiences, well-defined choices, and huge advertising budgets.  So we weren’t surprised when soon after the channels were launched, advertising reps started offering us packages targeting behaviorally-defined audiences interested in our candidate — or our competitors.

So the upshot of all this is that every time the Romney campaign would link from the www.mittromney.com to YouTube to watch a campaign video, it would be, in essence, allowing YouTube to tag that follower as a “Romney-interested” viewer so that the YouTube/Google advertising machine could then market them to other campaigns, PACs, and the like.  In effect, we would be acting as a list-acquisition engine for Google, who was free to remarket that “list” to others.

BOTH YouTube AND a Proprietary Internet TV Channel

For that reason, and many others that I’ll detail in a later posting, the Romney campaign decided to publish its own internet TV channel as part of www.mittromney.com, and to avoid wherever possible sending Romney enthusiasts into the YouTube/Google behavioral targeting machine, where viewers were just as likely to be offered oppo clips from rival campaigns as “related” videos as they were to see other material from the campaign..

The bottom line is this: free political campaign channels on YouTube certainly had their place — and an important one — in this campaign cycle.  They were a way of reaching out to a broad population of interested voters and drawing them back into the www.mittromney.com website for more information.  But as a way of crafting a deep, interactive video experience to visitors to the Romney site that didn’t get them tagged by behavioral targeting engines, we opted to create Mitt TV on the PermissionTV video publishing platform, and to weave video throughout the www.mittromney.com site.  I’ll cover how we chose a platform — and how we architected the channel — in a future post here on the Web Video Expert blog.

I’ve thought for some time that what we’re learning from the use of tactical web video in the 2008 presidential campaign will inform and inspire marketing and communications well beyond politics in 2008 and beyond. And as creators and producers of Mitt TV for the Romney for President campaign for the last 14 months, we’ve been privileged to have our hands in the incubator, so to speak.

So with the Romney campaign over and the experience fresh in my mind, I thought it would be useful to start writing down the key lessons we’ve learned from building the most sophisticated internet TV channel (and supporting Tactical Video Unit) for this campaign cycle.

Here, first of all, are my ten most important observations:

1. YouTube is a two-edged sword
2. A YouTube channel is necessary but not sufficient
3. A content-managed video platform is vital to success
4. When choosing a platform, back-end workflow is a key decision criterion.
5. Prepare for success: use a CDN (content delivery network)
6. Maintain one asset collection, many faces
7. Build a fast & flexible production process
8. Seeds and feeds build viewership
9. Don’t believe everything you read about clip length
10. Listen to the data

Each of these will merit its own entire post in the days and weeks to come, but let me take a moment to write an additional sentence or two about each; the elaboration on each topic will come later in this blog:

1. YouTube is a two-edged sword. A lot of campaigns are relying largely on YouTube channels generously “given” to the campaigns by the video site. And there’s no question that a lot of independent traffic saw our clips based on YouTube searches. But if part of the idea is not just to inform but also to inspire people to act (give money, sign up, give us their email, etc.) then YouTube was weak at the “call to action” part. And it’s just as likely that the NEXT video presented might be a competitor’s “oppo” clip.

2. A YouTube channel is necessary but not sufficient. Because of #1, we decided to invest in our own very rich channel that eventually had more than 400 video clips on it, which we control and tailor much more precisely and which were closely associated with our “calls to action” in the campaign. And the most remarkable statistic of all is that more people watched the Romney campaign’s clips on Mitt TV than on our YouTube channel.

3. A content-managed video platform is vital to success. Just as content management systems are key to maintaining lively, dynamic text websites, a content-managed web video publishing system is vital to building something as sophisticated as Mitt TV. We used PermissionTV as our platform with great success.

4. When choosing a platform, back-end workflow is a key decision criterion. One of my costliest mistakes in choosing a publishing platform was allowing the decision to be swayed more by how the channel looks than how it works on the back end in day-to-day production. The PermissionTV channel was beautiful and created a wonderful user experience, but its back-end was hellishly challenging in the early days (they’ve made good strides forward, based on our feedback).

5. Prepare for success: use a CDN. One of the most common mistakes I see webmasters and IT guys make is the decision to host and serve video from their own servers. And then they wonder why the lights dim and nobody can access the internet when a video clip gets popular. With many Mitt TV clips viewed simultaneously by hundreds of viewers (do the math: 100 simultaneous viewers = 50 megabits per second), a CDN is not optional – it’s essential.

6. Maintain one asset collection, many faces. With a large collection of video assets and a content management system, we were able to quickly create multiple sub-collections of Mitt TV, tailored to particular issues (see “The Briefing Room”), states, and even fans of Ann Romney via Ann TV.

7. Build a fast and flexible production process. As a documentary filmmaker, my mindset is often locked onto projects that take anywhere from six weeks to six months. But back in the seventies, I was also a daily news reporter…and it is that mentality of quick turnaround that I’ve had to bring to our tactical video unit. New tools help this: capturing to disk rather than tape, portable editing systems, on-the-fly video compression. These tools enabled us to measure camera-to-net times in minutes, not hours or days.

8. Seeds and feeds build viewership. While we had our share of “I want my Mitt TV” people tuning in every day to see what’s new, the key to building Mitt TV’s audience (which got as high as 70,000+ viewings a day in the late stages of the campaign) was outreach – to bloggers, through press releases, through RSS feeds. The result is that there are more than 23,000 references to Mitt TV on Google and more than 2,800 sites linking to Mitt TV.

9. Don’t believe everything you read about clip length. The conventional wisdom is that video clips need to be under 2 minutes to have a prayer of getting watched. But looking over the viewing statistics, we see that many of the most popular clips were complete speeches or events that were as long as 20 minutes or even more. For example, the 21-minute “Faith in America” speech was the third-most-highly-viewed clip on Mitt TV in December and January, and nearly half of the viewers watched every minute of it.

10. Listen to the data. One of the advantages of having your own internet TV channel is that there is a tremendous amount of data available about what works and what doesn’t. You can watch patterns of viewership and correlate it to different outreach efforts. You can see which clips are being viewed and for how long. And you can see where traffic is coming from. All this is useful in making a more effective channel.

The lessons of Mitt TV are valuable ones, and it’s too bad we won’t be able to apply the valuable data and learning to complete the campaign. Such is the nature of the winnowing-out process.

But the lessons are equally valuable to a wide range of our clients, across commercial, education, and not-for-profit domains. We don’t have to wait till the next campaign cycle to apply what we’ve learned; we’re already reviewing every one of our video production and web video clients to see how we can take the lessons of the campaign out to their marketing and communications efforts.

The incubation period is over.  Let the real fun begin.

Amid the frantic land grab in the internet video space — and in the desperate scramble by Yellow Pages to stay relevant in the face of the internet search boom — it appears that the YellowPages.com subsidiary of AT&T has outdriven its headlights with the launch of its new video advertising service.

Over at SearchMarketing Standard, Grant Crowell has an interesting article about his adventures trying to place a video ad on YellowPages.com, only to be led on the modern equivalent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride:

What happens when America’s largest Yellow Pages company jumps into online local video advertising without an actual product? Here’s my story of one very frustrated marketer who went through 10 very strange days until realizing that many things in the IYP space are not what they seem on the promotional surface.

Crowell concludes his tale of woe with:

Bizarre, isn’t it? YellowPages boasts about having the largest visitor exposure and is a subsidiary of the largest telecommunications company in the U.S., yet they can’t even put together a proper program for online video advertising for local businesses. Not only is there no real “nationwide rollout” like their press release back claimed there was, but apparently they’re being too secretive to even mention what “pilot markets” they’re actually doing video advertisements for.

On thing the I’ve learned from my many years in the online marketing and search industry – the actual execution of a marketing program is eventually going to trump any hype. YellowPages.com’s bungling of their Video Profile promotion highlights the ongoing troubles in the IYP space between online video advertising and their sales channels. When the largest IYP chooses to withhold important correspondence about promotional programs like this from their own sales reps, much less train them adequately in taking sales calls, all of the buzz that YellowPages.com has generate will eventually sting them.

One of my great professional joys over the years has been to attend the TED conference in Monterey, California — an annual gathering of about 1000 of the most forward-looking people across the Technology, Entertainment, and Design industries (thus the initials TED).  Many of the talks are quite serious and thought-provoking.  Others are…shall we say, unusual.

Now crossing my desk is a just-released clip from last year’s TED that I thought readers of this blog might enjoy.  It’s from David Pogue, tech writer for the New York Times.  Here, without further comment and for your amusement, is David’s four-minute history of music and video on the web:

As of tonight, our blog has a new name, reflecting the focus that’s emerged over the last 18 months: “Web Video Expert”.  And within the next 24 hours, you’ll all be able to reach us through a new URL (as well as all the old ones): web-video-expert.com.

As I mentioned in my last post, now that our most recent work in the U.S. presidential campaign has come to a close (like the former candidates, we’re leaving our future options open!), we’re ready to share a raft of ideas, insights, and techniques we’ve learned about web video and internet TV channels.

So our first step is to change the name to reflect the topic.  Let the brain-dump begin!

And I’d like to hear from all of you — either by reply-post or email — the topics you’d like me to tackle.

The long, hard fight for the GOP presidential nomination is over…and with it, the most intense and engaging experience of my professional career.  My experience as creator, architect, and producer of Mitt TV for the Mitt Romney for President campaign and head of the Campaign’s “Tactical Video Unit” has opened my eyes to the future of internet TV in communications and marketing…and has provided priceless lessons that I’ve already been incorporating into work for our other clients.

The intense time demands of the campaign — and the need to preserve the confidentiality of our approach — have forced me to be pretty quiet on this blog over the last six months or so.  But with Governor Romney’s announcement today that he’s suspending the campaign, I’m suddenly in a position to be able to speak more frequently and more freely in this forum.

Look for a flurry of new postings and ideas here on “Video Advisory”…and a refocusing of this blog around the powerful new world of web video marketing.  I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned…and what it means to every organization looking to tell their story on the web.

Michael Kolowich

In our new age of abundant broadband, we’ve started to take bandwidth for granted, just like the air we breathe and the water we swim in.  But now, Comcast and others are saying, “Not so fast!”  And that may have a chilling effect on the multimedia-hungry customers that we web video marketers want to cultivate.

While your cable modem might advertise that it can deliver a couple of megabits of information a second…don’t assume you can run your modem full tilt, all the time.  That’s what a growing number of subscribers have been finding out the hard way lately, when they’ve gotten pink-slipped by their cable company for using their internet connections too much.

According to a Washington Post article this week:

As Internet users make more demands of the network, cable companies in particular could soon end up with a critically short supply of bandwidth, according to a report released this month by ABI Research, a New York market-research firm. This could lead to a bigger crackdown on heavy bandwidth users, said the report’s author, Stan Schatt.

“These new applications require huge amounts of bandwidth,” he said. Cable “used to have the upper hand because they basically enjoyed monopolies, but there are more competitive pressures now.”

What most people don’t realize is that the bandwidth that cable services offer is shared across a whole lot of users in a town or neighborhood.  When one of us is downloading a whole lot of movies or songs, then that means there’s that much less bandwidth left for our neighbors.  That was fine for a while, but in a YouTube/web video world, the demands on bandwidth have suddenly and dramatically increased.

In many cases, like Comcast, the bandwidth appetite that will bring cancellation is not clear; in others, like Cox Cable, the “Limitations of Service” are published, and in the basic service tier, the monthly limits are pretty modest: 3 gigabytes per month, which is only about 800 minutes of streaming video (about a half-hour a day).

I’m not sure this has any grave implications yet for those of us (and our clients) who use web video as an embedded component of our websites.  But it does suggest that something we take for granted may actually be limited.  When that happens, we may find our web video viewers getting a bit more discriminating about how they spend their time.

Two articles this week illustrate the pressure Google must be feeling after its acquisition of YouTube late last year.

• In the first, the general counsel of Viacom lays out its copyright infringement case against YouTube in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece:

YouTube defends itself from copyright infringement based on one narrow slice of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act): protecting service providers who store copyrighted material solely and simply “at the direction of a user.” This defense is available only to users who do not have “knowledge” of infringement or who “expeditiously” take down material when they find out they are infringing a copyright. The defense is not available to someone who “derives a financial benefit” from copyrighted material he stores if he has the “right and ability to control” it.

The DMCA strikes a logical compromise among competing interests and is one of many sound policies that have allowed the Web to develop and flourish. Under the act, Web hosting companies have been able to develop with no obligation to monitor every file loaded and downloaded by their users. E-mail operators have been able to safely maintain their facilities without reading every message that passes through their systems. File storage Web sites allow users to back up their hard drives without needing to patrol every file and without fear of copyright liability.

What the DMCA doesn’t do is protect YouTube.

• The second article appeared in Advertising Age, and suggests that, for all its traffic, YouTube has yet to develop any significant advertising revenue streams:

Right now, what YouTube has is eyeballs, many more than any other video website and many that you can’t easily find watching TV. What it doesn’t have a lot of is the kind of