Over the last few years implementing web video experiences for extraordinary clients, we’ve accumulated quote a few practical examples that are worth sharing. So I thought I’d start sharing some of these experiences on the “Web Video Expert” blog.

And when looking at case studies, where better to start than the Mecca of case study teaching, Harvard Business School?

HBS commissioned us at DigiNovations to create a film that dove deep into what makes the Harvard approach to case method teaching truly unique and valuable, and the result was a film called “Inside the Case Method”.  Originally intended for prospective MBA students, interest in the film has spread far beyond its intended audience.  The web version of the video alone was viewed more than 50,000 times in its first year.

Step One: Traditional Web Player

When they first got the film, HBS’ first instinct was to embed it in a single player that played the film from beginning to end — all 13 minutes of it.  This was straightforward to implement, and we deployed the player on the Brightcove platform and gave HBS a few lines of embed code to put into their web page.  The result was this kind of look:

While this is a reasonably “vanilla” approach to staging video (especially such a long one), implementing the player in Brightcove offered several advantages:

• Since it’s implemented in Flash, as opposed to Windows Media, QuickTime, or RealMedia, it is automatically compatible with more computing platforms than any other option;
• The player sports several viral features, including “email this” and “get link” buttons to help people spread the word;
• The video was hosted outside HBS’ servers in a worldwide content distribution network, which meant that it could support many simultaneous users without taxing HBS’ servers or creating bandwidth bottlenecks that could ruin the viewer experience;
• HBS and DigiNovations had access to detailed viewing statistics; and
• Since the film was implemented on a content management system, it was easy to post revisions to the video without getting into expensive and time-consuming web programming.

Still, putting a monolithic, 13-minute video on the web is “oh-so-2005,” as my teenage daughter might say.  Part of the message of the video was in its structure, and we urged HBS to consider player design options that exposed the film’s structure and allowed the viewer to move around from part to part.

Step 2: A Multi-Chapter Interactive Player

To expose the structure a bit, we broke the film into its constituent parts — each of which represented a different phase of the case method process.  Then we built a multi-chapter interactive player that made each section of the film easily findable and recognizable, just by rolling over the lower part of the player.  The result is an experience that serves two kinds of viewers: the patient types, who might just want to view the film from beginning to end; and the impatient types, who might just want to go directly to an area of interest:

This player is implemented on the new PermissionTV 2.0 platform, and required some Flash/Flex programming by our resident genius, Alex Kieft.  Again, the PermissionTV platform enables us to implement viral features such as “mail this”, “link this”, and “embed this” buttons.  Now that we’ve implemented this format, though, it’s easy for us to take any multi-chapter film and present it in this player format.

Step 3: Full Integration into the Website Design

Recently, Harvard Business School launched a whole new website for its MBA program, and is featuring “Inside the Case Method” as a centerpiece of its presentation.  This illustrates beautifully what a client can do with a generous budget and a commitment to integrating video fully into its web design.

Click through to the MBA website, and then on the words “LEARNING MODEL” in the menu on the banner of the screen.  Now you’ll see a sequence of scenes, excerpted from the film we produced, dedicated to the learning and teaching model at HBS.

Is it necessary to go all the way to an integrated design in order to full engage visitors in video content?  I personally don’t think so; the multi-chapter player in Step 2 is a great solution for smaller budgets.  But when the big budget is there, integrated web design certainly creates an attractive, engaging, highly functional experience.

We have great admiration for what HBS has done with our video on their website, and believe that marketers can learn a great deal from the three different levels of sophistication they’ve pursued in presenting “inside the Case Method” to the public.