Web Video Expert

Interview: The State of Web Video Marketing

2010-01-31T14:05:26Z

Here is the transcript of an interview with DigiNovations’ Michael Kolowich, conducted by James Careless of DV (Digital Video) Magazine for the February 2010 issue.

1) Where does web video stand these days: how much of it are you doing, what is the quality, what are the most common platforms, and so forth?

Very, very close to 100% of the projects that we do today have at least one web video component. It is by far the most dominant delivery destination we have. Even when we’re doing TV spots or live events, there is almost always a web version that’s a little longer, more comprehensive, and tailored to web audiences.

We produce everything we do in full, 1920x1080p…even if its principal destination is for the web. With the technology we now have in cameras and editing systems, there is little cost or performance difference between SD and HD, default to full HD and down-res for the web as needed. Our principal camera format is XDCAM EX, which we shoot mostly at 30p.

Moving to progressive rather than interlaced video formats has dramatically improved the quality of our encoded material for the web. We’ve been using Flash Video (with the ON2 codecs) principally, but have recently changed our mix more to H.264 for broader compatibility with mobile devices.

The web video we produce goes everywhere — from YouTube to Facebook on one end of the spectrum to Brightcove-based private internet TV channels integrated into company websites on the other end.

2) Who among your clients is using web video, and how are they using it?

Every single one of our clients is using web video, almost without exception. That’s not coincidence — we fan the flames quite a bit, encouraging them to think about web distribution for everything. But more and more clients are coming to us with web video in mind right from the outset.

3) How popular is web video, in terms of your clients?

Web video is popular among clients, but for most of them, their understanding of the possibilities is not terribly sophisticated. They’re looking for insight, advice, and help. Many of them are marketing communications pros who’ve just been told, “Get us one of those viral videos on YouTube please.” They need education about the difference between putting up a video and a smart video marketing program.

4) What challenges exist in producing and serving web video?

Until recently, the biggest challenge in web video was in the many steps required to prepare it, transcode it, upload it, and test it. The settings in compression software were often obscure and difficult to comprehend. Much of that has changed in the last year. The latest versions of NLE’s have a raft of presets that handle the most common cases. Services like Brightcove and YouTube employ server-side encoding software that will take just about anything you can upload and make it look halfway decent. Note I said “halfway”, though. There is still a lot of value to a video professional knowing the ins and outs of compression, because the settings you use for, say, a talking head are radically different from what you might use for a sporting event. Knowing what kinds of material compresses well or poorly can also influence the choice of shooting style, transitions, and effects for material that’s destined primarily for the web.

5) Is there demand for ‘HD web video’? If so, what challenges does it present compared to regular streaming video?

In most business-to-business video marketing applications, a demand for HD web video per se has not yet developed. That changes, though, as you get more into consumer markets like fashion or TV programming-on-demand. The most common platforms we employ, though, make this a non-issue. The majority of our videos go through Brightcove or YouTube, both of which offer a multi-encoding approach that prepares multiple renditions of each uploaded video (from HD to sub-SD resolutions), detects the viewer’s connection speed, and serves up the appropriate version based on the viewer’s available bandwidth.

6) Where do you expect web video to go in the next year (i.e. what changes and progress)?

Over the next year, we can expect to see more interactivity built into the video stream. Clickable hot spots, synchronized web page events, sidebar video segments are all coming, which will extend the experience of web video viewing beyond the 16:9 frame and onto the web page that surrounds it.

At the same time, analytics will get a lot more interesting and valuable. We’ll be able to tell even more about how groups of viewers react to a video segment, second by second, and relate those reactions to commercial calls to action, such as buying a good or signing up for a cause.

And finally, video for mobile devices will start to become more standardized, and therefore more consistently available as a messaging platform for video markers.

I believe these new capabilities will come to full flower just in time for the next presidential campaign, which will kick off just about a year from now. (I headed the digital media team for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign last time around.)

7) Do you foresee a day when video will be produced solely for the web?

It depends what you mean by the question. If you mean will projects be developed that are purely web video, it’s already happening. If you mean web video to the exclusion of all other media, I highly doubt it. Even if DVD’s go the way of the VHS tape, we’ll be seeing new media that we never even imagined that will make interactive, high-definition web video seem downright primitive.

PermissionTV Rebrands, Focuses: VisibleGains takes on B2B Video Marketing

2009-10-06T19:57:27Z

Our friends and collaborators at PermissionTV have shuffled the deck and come up with a unique and very interesting new video solution for B2B web marketing. And in the process, they’re about to re-brand the company as “VisibleGains”.

Tomorrow morning, VisibleGains will be introduced as a clever, dialog-based approach to creating a video “conversation” with a prospective buyer of B2B products and services. The team at VisibleGains has capitalized on PermissionTV’s deep and stable video delivery infrastructure and built a simple system for organizing video clips along a chain of video clips, interspersed with questions that allow customers to “drive” the conversation, customizing the information they receive.

Focusing its efforts on B2B video marketing/sales applications would seem to be a wise move for Cliff Pollan and the VisibleGains team. Its predecessor company, PermissionTV, was undercapitalized, undermanned, and undersold relative to competitor Brightcove in the race to sign up media companies for private video hosting services known as internet TV channels — this, despite an early lead in platform technology. Facing game, set, and match in the internet TV channel market, VisibleGains has chosen focus over flexibility, and has landed in a market where there are thousands of clients scrambling for solutions.

As one of VisibleGain’s charter production partners, we at DigiNovations have now started working with the new system…and we like what we see in the first release. Look for us to launch a new set of services in the near future, using the VisibleGains system as a central part of our communications strategy. As we wade in more deeply with the VisibleGains software and service, we’ll let you know how it goes.

It's Time to Re-Think the "Ideal Page Width" for Web Design

2009-09-09T11:10:51Z

For years, the conventional wisdom for those of us who design web pages is that we should be designing web pages for 800x600 screens — that is, screens that are 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. That means a web page should be 720 pixels wide, give or take, to allow for scroll bars on an 800-wide screen. Under this assumption, the precious “above the fold” space — that is, the part of the web page that’s visible without scrolling down on the page — is around 400 pixels.

A 710-pixel-wide website gets lost on today’s new 1920x1080 screensA recent dive into Google Analytics for diginovations.com suggests that 800x600 design point is just plain bunk these days. Big, high-resolution screens have taken over the world, and those who are designing 710-pixel-wide sites are leaving precious real estate “on the table.” (See inset to the right, illustrating how a 710-wide website gets lost on today’s most modern 1920x1080 displays.)

So dramatic were the data that I took the Labor Day Weekend to re-design diginovations.com to a new design standard of 920 pixels wide — a 30% increase in width. Our visitors are now enjoying a world of larger video windows and photographs, text lines that are less choppy, and more information above the fold.

Discovering Your Visitors’ Screen Widths

Google Analytics offers a treasure-trove of raw data about visitors to your website, their traffic patterns, and conversion rates. But buried inside the “Visitors” tab under “Browser Capabilities” is a button labeled “Screen Resolutions”, and this is where I found the news that, frankly, shocked me. Here are the top 10 screen resolutions for visitors to diginovations.com over the last few weeks:

As you can see, the first time we see a screen narrower than 1024 pixels is down at #10 (800x600, 1.2% of visitors). Further down the list, the next instance is at #22 (320x396, 0.33% of visitors) and then #32 (800x800, .07% of visitors).

Since we had designed our site for the nearly non-existent 800-pixel-wide visitor, it was clear that a re-design was in order. I was delivering an inefficient and sub-par experience to 98.5% of my visitors in order to accommodate 1.5% of them. We redesigned our site to the 98.5% case (1024 wide), widening both our navigation and main columns.

Your Mileage May Vary

Of course, it may be argued that since visitors to diginovations.com tend to be more sophisticated users (i.e. video and marketing types), we may be catering to an atypically big-screen audience. Indeed, looking at the same statistics for a more consumer-oriented site we manage (www.memoryworks.com), the percentage of sub-1024-pixel screens was just over 4% rather than 1.5%. We would still recommend the widening of this site, though, because of the clearly superior user experience delivered by the wider columns and larger video and image windows.

The Small-Screen Experience

Over the next few years, we’ll also need to be doing more to accommodate mobile browsers such as iPhones and Blackberries as well. These visitors are now less than .5% of our traffic, but other classes of website such as news sites are seeing much more activity from mobile browsers. When the need comes, the way to handle these visitors is not to keep the website small, but instead to design special versions of the site for mobile users as they become more important in the visitor mix.

How to Tell a Story in Video: NPR's Scott Simon and more

2009-07-04T09:45:08Z

I loved this piece by National Public Radio’s Scott Simon on storytelling…and how to do it well in video:

At DigiNovations, we think a lot about storytelling. After all, we represent ourselves as “New England’s Video Storytellers.” But we don’t often get to articulate what storytelling is all about in our medium.

To Scott’s excellent summary, I would add:

Great stories are memorable, and they do something to impress themselves on the consciousness. They might surprise. They might demonstrate something in an unusual way. They might do something that exceeds expectations.
Great stories not only start strongly (Scott’s point), but end strongly. They leave an image or point that reverberates and fills the room when it’s over.
Great stories create a certain amount of suspense about the outcome. The curiosity about the end, planted at the beginning, pulls a viewer through to the conclusion.
Great stories don’t let the technology or the execution get in the way. The audio is crisp, the graphics non-intrusive (unless they’re part of the story), and the effects are tasteful.
Finally, great stories start a conversation — if only the viewers with themselves — about what it means for them. About what they should do next.

Today, there are a lot of people picking up video cameras and shooting “stories”. But as the volume of video stories explodes, the percentage of them that tell great stories seems to diminish. (Consider this lament by a newspaper-reporter-turned-video-reporter.)

The next time you see a TV news story or TV newsmagazine piece that strikes you as particularly good, take a moment to break it down. Chances are, you’ll see that it’s these techniques of video storytelling that make the difference.

Why Google is willing to sustain big losses at YouTube...and what it means

2009-07-03T18:48:18Z

An interesting counterpoint to the whole argument that YouTube is a financial drag on Google has been posted on the Telco 2.0 blog. From time to time, I’ve expressed concern that YouTube’s “bring it all on” approach to online video, which by some analysts’ estimates loses many hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is unsustainable.

In a long, detailed analysis entitled “Google: The Internet Behemoth and how it profits from YouTube”, the authors argue that YouTube is actually a cornerstone for a much larger and cagier domination strategy for Google — one that has CDN (content delivery network) providers like Akamai in its sights.

Their basic conclusions:

“We believe that YouTube is used indirectly to drive profits at the parent, and that Google is currently incentivized to keep these profits hidden from prying eyes. The key indirect benefits accruing to Google of owning YouTube are as follows:

YouTube gains Google a critical slice of growing online video eyeballs, which will attract more marketing dollars to the Internet as a whole. This is much more important in the USA, where the main competitor Hulu is ad-funded than the UK, where the BBC iPlayer is taxpayer funded;

YouTube gains Google yet more important meta-data which can be cross-pollinated with data from other Google services;

YouTube traffic strengthens Google specifically in peering negotiations and generally in network design;

YouTube is probably a small fraction of Google’s overall cost base, and the spin-off benefits from lower overall unit costs; and

YouTube positions Google very powerfully for a key role as a gatekeeper in the copyright world.

If this is indeed what Google is really up to, and it’s willing to sustain losses indefinitely at YouTube in order to feed its high-level corporate strategy, then the implications both for marketers and for video-hosting competitors get pretty interesting.

Marketers, for their part, would be able to continue counting on having an extremely inexpensive reach vehicle for getting their companies’ and organizations’ messages out in video. But at the same time, they need to be fully cognizant of how the benefits this kind of free lunch come at a considerable cost and risk (see my past posts “YouTube is a Two-Edged Sword” and “No Free Lunch”). It’s still important, I believe, for an organization to maintain both a public “reach” video presence (via YouTube) and a private “engagement” video presence (via a services like Brightcove, PermissionTV, or Ooyala) on their website.

These private services, however, will continue to feel pricing heat, as they find it more and more difficult to compete with the free hosting offered by YouTube. How long before somebody plays the “predatory pricing” card? Meanwhile, though, these private video hosting services continue to focus their offerings on engagement and monetization features that directly make money for their customers. Look for a lot of new capabilities in the year ahead that will once again change the landscape of options video marketers have.

Cisco's CEO: "Video is the killer app"; We agree

2009-07-01T11:19:49Z

Cisco CEO John Chambers, speaking yesterday at Cisco Live in San Francisco, painted a scenario about how video is already becoming an integral part of the business process of leading-edge companies — not just at the top, but at every level.

Take a look at this video clip, where he not only lays out a vision across the economy but also talks very concretely about how it’s changing Cisco.

We quite agree, which is exactly why we started DigiNovations. What can we do to help you change how you interact with your customers — and each other — using video?

PermissionTV's new CEO: "Every company is a content company these days"

2009-06-28T12:43:59Z

In a far-ranging interview, Cliff Pollan, the new CEO of one of our partners, PermissionTV, talks about how video is changing the process of selling. Along the way, he says that every company needs to start viewing itself as a content company, providing rich information to help customers understand not only their product but also their need.

In his words, we can start to see hints of a new direction for PermissionTV in supporting the selling process in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets. The key, he says, is to rethink the architecture of video into short, “snackable” segments that can be arranged interactively to replicate a relationship-building sales conversation.

This use of video as a selling tool is obviously of extreme interest to us at DigiNovations, and we’re tracking PermissionTV’s evolution very closely, as well as sharing our experience with them. Look for some very interesting new capabilities for video marketers to surface from PermissionTV over the months ahead!

Ten ways marketers drop the ball in video marketing

2009-06-28T12:34:06Z

On the phone, our client was puzzled, maybe a little miffed. “My web video doesn’t work,” she complained. “Our video takes forever to download. Can you please figure out what’s wrong?”

I recalled that a few weeks before, we’d offered to create a custom web player to showcase the promotional video we’d produced for our client’s company. “No thank you,” she’d replied, turning down the offer. “Our webmaster has it covered.”

Moments after the call, I concluded that just about everything was wrong about how our client had staged the video on her website. From the web page, a lame text link downloaded a Windows Media file. And since the video was 10 minutes long, it was minutes before a viewer got to see anything.

In this case, the fix was relatively easy. We quickly built a custom Flash-based video player, and within minutes our client’s site visitors were seeing vivid, instant-on video right on the pages of her site. But it left me shaking my head; how did our client arrive at a video marketing solution that’s literally 5 years out of date, just by trusting that “Our webmaster has it covered”?

This, sadly, is not a rare occurrence. It is a scene I see played out over and over again by clients who rely on outdated and mistaken notions about how to stage video on their websites. And more often than not, those mistakes come from over-reliance on web designers who are not always up to date on the state of the art in interactive video.

After the call, I sat down and put together a list of the ten most common mistakes marketers make with video on their websites. The frightening thing is that the list is easy…and there were even more left on the cutting room floor.

Here, then, are the ten mistakes we see far too often:

Making web video deployment an afterthought. Very often, the production of a video is driven by a big live event, a trade show, or a special presentation. And only after the event is finished does the attention turn to internet deployment. That’s too late.
Failing to use a modern video format. Flash and H.264 formats look great, work on Macs and PCs, and allow you to put your best foot forward. Windows Media, RealMedia, and most flavors of QuickTime are not formats you want to use.
Failing to have your video professionally encoded. There are lots of shortcut ways to prep your video for the web, but they use least-common-denominator parameters and often miss opportunities to make your video look as good as it possibly can. Video compression is still both art and science, and the best web video experts know the right combination of resolution, frame rate, bit rate, keyframe frequency, frame size, and deinterlacing method to use with any particular application.
Using YouTube the wrong way. YouTube can be an awesome vehicle for achieving reach with your video, but using YouTube to embed video on your own website is a real mistake for a whole variety of reasons. While YouTube is attractive because it’s “free”, there are genuine costs to using it that every marketer needs to understand. I’ve blogged about this previously in a Web Video Expert post, I’ll offer a separate and updated post on this here soon.
Hosting video on your own server. Corporate web servers are simply not optimized for hosting video to be accessed from outside the organization. We know lots of stories of web videos that suddenly got popular and brought an organization’s servers to its knees. There are far better solutions in the marketplace which can instantly scale to any level of demand generated as your video “goes viral”.
Failing to search-optimize your video. Because it’s impossible for search engines to discern the contents of a web video, Google and its peers rely on titles, descriptions, keywords, news release pointers, and inbound links to decide when to show a video in its search results. There is a new art of search optimization for web videos, and we’ll be blogging a lot about that here.
Failing to issue a call to action at the end. Once you’ve engaged and touched a viewer with your message, they often are left asking, “So what do I do next?” We find that marketers are not always good at issuing a call to action — especially when it comes to videos put out on YouTube or other public sites.
Failing to seed video through community connections. Tweeters, bloggers, and Facebookers love to be the first to talk about new video programs in their area of interest. Yet marketers too often leave it to these community “connectors” to discover a video on their own. Proactivity pays off big-time in accelerating your video message through a special-interest community.
Failing to use email marketing effectively in conjunction with a video release. Video messages can inherently lift click-through rates for email campaigns. And email campaigns can have a profound effect on the distribution of a video. There is a growing body of knowledge about what to put in your email message to encourage click through. Hint: plain text links saying “watch our video” are not the answer.
Failing to use appropriate viral widgets with your video. Do you want viewers to email the video with others who might be interested? To embed it in their blog or webpage? To Digg it? To tweet about it on Twitter? In addition to a concrete call to action (buy, donate, join, etc.), each video should have a well-considered “call to share” built in to the video player.

And that’s just a start. There are easily ten more ways to improve your video marketing program, by designing interactivity into the player, managing clip lengths, applying emerging measurement devices, making the right choice between streaming and progressive download, and many more decisions.

You’ve invested thousands of dollars — maybe tens of thousands — in producing a video program or film that tells your story in a engaging, compelling way. Why not take advantage of every advantage afforded you by the most powerful medium ever created?

The tools to help you do so are plentiful, but they are also confusing and rapidly evolving. No professional marketer could possibly be expected to keep up with every option. That’s why we created Channel One Marketing Group, a team of top-drawer thought leaders (including David Meerman Scott, Greg Jarboe, and Janice Brown) whose job it is to stay on top of these tools so you don’t have to.

We’re looking forward to sharing our experiences with you — both through the Channel One blog and through our work with many of the world’s best brands on multimedia marketing programs for the web.

And the next time your webmaster says “I’ve got it covered” with respect to web video, make sure he know’s what he’s talking about.

RNC learns the hard way: there is no "free lunch" in political video hosting

2009-02-28T16:05:53Z

Immediately following President Obama’s address to Congress this week, the Republican National Committee sent out an email blast to all its supporters (right), inviting them to donate and to watch Governor Bobby Jindal’s Republican response to the speech. The link opens up a browser window pointed at the Jindal video on Blip.tv, a free, advertising-based service that provides video hosting and distribution to independent producers of video (and promises to send video creators a 50% share of the advertising revenue it generates from the videos it posts).

That sounds just great, but here’s the catch: the RNC has no control of the ads or “related videos” posted alongside its video segments. And the adjacencies can be, shall we say, unpredictable. Click, for example, on the thumbnail image to the left to view what viewers would see today when they click on the “WATCH” button in the RNC email, and you’ll what I mean. Take a look, in particular, at the “Featured Episodes” list on the right-hand side of the video page. There, right alongside the spokesman for the Republican Party, on a page headlined “Republican National Committee”, is an encouragement to watch the following:

“Who’s Coming to Dinner” — “In this week’s episode of Cherry Bomb, the ladies cover a topic every lesbian will face sooner or later: When is it time to take your girlfriend home to meet the parents?”
“Enter The Fold” — “A time-traveling geek with Asperger’s Syndrome, an investigation by a Gaming Babes Magazine reporter, a sex-cult guru.”
“Post-Baby Body” — “Rounder tummies, stretch marks, and big changes, um, “down there.” A woman’s body gets knocked around during pregnancy…”

Not exactly red-meat Republican stuff.

Elsewhere on the page are clickable ads urging viewers to donate to various causes unrelated to the GOP. And I swear I saw an ad for something else splashed across the Governor’s image when I first saw it on Wednesday, though the ad is no longer present.

The non-sequiturs of “related” videos and competitive ads aside, the RNC’s use of Blip.tv rather than their own private channel represents a terrible waste of an opportunity. Today’s internet TV technology — through platforms like Brightcove and PermissionTV — could have served up Gov. Jindal’s response in a custom-designed player for about a penny per view. More importantly, it would serve up Gov. Jindal’s address in a custom video player specially designed to call the viewer to action — through integrated polling, animated calls to action, email address-collection tools, viral tools, and other devices that would use the video as a launching point for an interactive experience designed to motivate the audience to the RNC’s purpose, not to get them to watch an unrelated video when they’re finished.

So to summarize, the RNC traded away an opportunity to capitalize on its viewership by going the “free video” route. And even worse, the choice they presented in the email blast was an either/or choice (“DONATE” or “WATCH”), and the video did not tie viewers back to the DONATE action as a follow-on.

Does this mean that the RNC should not have published the Gov. Jindal video out on free, ad-supported services? Absolutely not; they should publish the video wherever they can, for services like Blip.tv and YouTube offer reach to audiences beyond the RNC list and try to get them back to the private channel for further engagement. But to use an ad-based service to try to engage an already-identified audience is simply a mistake, because the value in additional follow-on action in a controlled environment far exceeds the penny or so it costs to serve up the video.

One of the many things that the Obama presidential campaign did right with technology was to use both reach channels (like YouTube) and engagement channels (i.e. BarackTV on Brightcove) in close coordination. The Mitt Romney 2008 campaign was also out in front on this with Mitt TV, and was ready to roll out some unprecedented video engagement tools for a general election campaign.

Internet video is a new and exciting tool for political campaigns. And during a time when services like Blip.tv and even YouTube are struggling to find their business models and offering lots of free goodies, it’s tempting to take advantage of their apparent largesse and use the free tools while you can. But the opportunity cost of this can be great, as internet video has huge potential as an engagement medium. And that will be the big tech story of the 2012 campaign.

To read and hear more about our experience in using video channels in political campaigns, see also:

“In Political Campaigns, YouTube is a Two-Edged Sword”
“Ten Lessons from Mitt TV”
Podcast Interview: “Presidential Candidates See Web Video Differently”
Interview: “Mitt TV”

Behind the successful facade, YouTube still flailing

2009-02-14T17:15:41Z

On this Valentine’s Day, I have to confess to a love-hate relationship with YouTube for over three years.

On the one hand, you’ve got to love the speed at which YouTube rocketed into the world’s consciousness. (Take a look at my Sept 2006 post, “The Most Impressive Growth Chart, Ever?” to see just how fast.)
On the other hand, you’ve got to hate how much of that growth came from playing fast-and-loose with copyright laws in the early days (See my Oct 2006 post, “YouTube’s Legacy…After the Fall”)
You’ve got to love how YouTube was almost single-handedly responsible for taking web video viewing habits from a sideshow for tolerant webheads to a mainstream American activity
On the other hand, you’ve got to hate how much money they’ve blown on a business model that would not be sustainable without huge cash infusions from its deep-pocketed owner, Google
You’ve got to love how YouTube has given a brilliant new channel for companies, organizations, and political candidates to get their message out in dramatic new ways.
But you’ve got to hate how Google’s willingness to pour massive cash subsidies into YouTube’s losing business model is suppressing the success of smaller entities who are working hard to support the strategic use of web video with much more sustainable business models.

Today, strong as its market presence is, YouTube is still flailing about. The latest traffic charts from Alexa.com show that YouTube’s popularity has leveled over the last six months, and in fact has even tailed off a bit (other than the blip around Inauguration Day):

After declaring near the end of last year that monetization is the “number 1 priority in 2009”, its first new effort of the year — giving content providers the option to charge for video downloads — has been greeted by the market with a yawn. A deal with MGM to run full-length feature films on YouTube is nearly invisible on the site. And today’s YouTube home page ad for condom-maker Trojan — just in time for Valentine’s Day — is just plain lame. (Tellingly, Trojan didn’t use YouTube to host the videos once you click through to its site; they merely use YouTube to generate traffic, not to engage them once they’re there.)

But as frustrating as the YouTube journey has to be for Google investors and management (who are on the hook for the $1.65 billion they spent to buy it and the countless tens of millions they’ve poured into it), that’s their problem, not ours. As YouTube viewers, content creators, and marketing communications strategists, we’re happy to benefit from Google’s largesse in providing a great platform for distributing video messages and getting people back to our clients’ websites…just as we are happy optimizing our website for Google’s text search and reaping the benefits.

But when clients ask whether they should invest in building enduring channels on the YouTube infrastructure, I generally wave them off…for just like Google Search, the infrastructure, rules, and success formulae are constantly changing. You can’t build a lasting foundation on sands that are so fragile and dynamic.

Better, I tell them, to use a foundation like Brightcove for building an online video presence, and to use YouTube opportunistically for customer acquisiiton and broad dissemination of messages. For the one thing we know about YouTube is that it must change — substantially — for Google’s charity and patience will not necessarily last forever.

New Study: Web Video is a Top 2009 Marketing Priority

2008-12-19T01:06:49Z

The folks over at PermissionTV released their new 2008 Digital Marketing Study today, showing that web video is the top digital marketing priority in the coming year — topping social media, search marketing, podcasting, rich media, banner ads, and mobile. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents in the survey agreed that “through non-linear, interactive storytelling, online video will become the most effective medium for marketers.”

Among the conclusions of the survey:

“More than two thirds of respondents (67%) identified online video as a primary focus of their 2009 digital marketing campaigns.

In Q2 of 2009, more than half (52%) of respondents expect to be implementing or extending an online video project, whereas currently less than one-third (32%) are doing so.

A majority of respondents (63%) are most likely to invest in a branded content/video destination next year.

Nearly 60% of respondents consider interactive video experiences to be the next evolution for online video.

When asked how online video will enhance customer engagement, a vast majority (71%) stated it would help build brand awareness.”

PermissionTV’s survey results are certainly consistent with our own observations of what’s going on the marketplace. Our clients are showing an unprecedented amount of interest in doing something with web video. But they’re also confused about where to start.

This, too, comes out in the PermissionTV study, which shows that nearly 40% of clients surveyed would start with their web design firm in implementing an interactive video initiative on the web. Yet, we are finding that web design firms often lag behind in knowledge about new internet TV platforms such as PermissionTV and Brightcove. What’s more, we are seeing great value in co-designing the content and the presentation platform for it, so that the interactivity works together in a very rich storytelling experience.

That’s why, as a firm, we at DigiNovations have invested in the new set of skills in internet TV platform development that will allow video content and interactive presentation to be developed under the same roof. It’s a new model, and breaks the church-and-state-style separation that has divided web development from content generation in the past.

But in a new age where interactivity can be an integral part of the storytelling, we feel it will be a great advantage to have both content and design skills on the same team.

The End of Brightcove's Free Lunch

2008-12-17T20:26:36Z

The wailing and gnashing of teeth you’re hearing today from some corners of the video web comes from former users of the free version of Brightcove’s internet TV platform. As of midnight tonight, an unknown quantity of free web video channels will simply cease to work — the result of Brightcove’s decision to concentrate its efforts on its very successful business serving high-volume media companies (the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Weather Channel, and National Geographic) and other top-of-the-line video applications like the Obama campaign’s Barack TV.

Thus ends a two-year experiment in which Brightcove offered for free a remarkably capable version of a platform for which media companies were paying tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The idea had been to create millions of ad availabilities…and to sell those availabilities to advertisers and sponsors.

Despite the superior technology of its platform, Brightcove was never quite able to compete with YouTube to build a critical mass of content and viewings. And as a venture-backed company without the deep pockets of Google behind it (such as YouTube has), Brightcove could not hang on long enough in the “free” space while a business model for video sorts itself out. (It still hasn’t, even for YouTube.)

On the one hand, the business strategist in me understands Brightcove’s move. After all, despite its lavish funding, the company was clearly spread too thinly across two very different busineses — a media business and a software infrastructure business for media companies.

But the sad thing about Brightcove’s decision is that they seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In addition to the hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny free account-holders who doubtless chewed up more resources than they generated, Brightcove is also cutting off a many promising new internet TV applications. Brightcove has thrown these clients a lifeline of sorts, but it’s now clear that the $500 per month price point of the new Brightcove Basic service is simply too high for many of these budding applications to sustain, and they’ve now scattered to new places.

Early in Brightcove’s life, as it was coming out of an extended beta-test period and going into general release, CEO Jeremy Allaire told me that “Brightcove’s vision and product and service strategy is a mass market vision. We anticipate that there will be tens of thousands of unique publishers and programmers launching internet TV content, and we are committed to making available business models that work for everyone.”

He committed Brightcove to a pricing model that is “highly affordable for those who are delivering non-ad supported content (whether that be small media, websites, corporations, government, non-profit or educational content).”

I love the Brightcove platform, and so do our clients at DigiNovations. Its latest version (Brightcove 3.1, which I’ll be reviewing in this space shortly) is a brilliant implementation of a video-specific content management system and it now offers a wonderfully rich development language that supports rapid creation and customization of Flash-based video players.

But we’re finding that most internet TV channel applications start small and gather richness, content, and traffic only later. Few of them can support a $6000 annual price tag for just the web presentation component from Day One.

Brightcove doesn’t have to be free. There’s certainly enough value there to command a price for what Brightcove brings. But over he last few weeks, I’ve seen enough faces go white…and then red when they hear the minimum price tag, that I know that Brightcove Basic’s current price is too high by at least a factor of two.

I still believe that that nearly every business, school, and not-for-profit organization should have an internet TV channel of some sort on their website within the next five years. With its current pricing strategy, Brightcove may be taking itself out of contention to be the platform be the broad enabler I once imagined it could be.

When No Video is Better than Bad Video

2008-12-08T12:07:12Z

Did you catch the item in the New York Times about Canadian Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion, who’s video presentation to the nation drew more attention for its amateur quality than for its content? It’s called “Bad Video Overshadows Politician’s Message”, and it contains a cautionary tale for everyone who’s been trying to equate authenticity and folksy-ness with amateur production values.

The scene was the night before the recent crisis in the Canadian Parliament, in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper shut down Parliament to avoid being defeated by a coalition led by Dion. Both Harper and Dion had the opportunity to address the Canadian people on national television.

According to the Times description, PM Harper’s message was professionally packaged, offering viewers “a slick presentation complete with elaborate opening graphics”. Here’s what they saw when it came to Dion’s chance to make his case to the nation:

Mr. Dion’s face was out of focus. A cluttered bookshelf in the background, which was in sharp focus, contained a book titled “Hot Air”.

…

The production was of such poor quality that many political writers focused as much on its shortcomings as on Mr. Dion’s remarks. In addition to suggestions that it had been made by children using a mobile phone camera or an inexpensive webcam, some compared it to a video of a hostage released by kidnappers.

What’s more, the tape was delayed getting on the air by 20 minutes, due to the fact that it was delivered to the networks in an amateur format that the networks couldn’t play. (See the video here.)

Remarkably, the amateur video may prove to be Dion’s undoing in Canada, as the Financial Post reported yesterday that “Liberal Party Infighting Explodes over Dion’s Video ‘Mess’; Botched statement brings divisions between staff, advisors to the forefront”.

In a world where amateur YouTube videos, shot with handheld consumer camcorders, are seen increasingly on national television, it’s tempting to try to attribute qualities of “casual” and “authentic” to videos with amateur production values. We’re starting to see product demonstrations on commercial websites shot with amateur camcorders, with no thought to lighting, composition, sound, or sometimes even focus. Even in a presidential campaign we were deeply involved with, our candidate would sometimes, on impulse, have a staffer grab a camcorder to tape a quick Christmas message out on the patio behind the building.

Authentic? Maybe on some level. But more often than not, the quality of the “casual” production gets in the way of the message. When someone presents important messages in a form that’s obviously below-par in format, it sends a different kind of message: that the speaker cares so little about the audience that they’re unwilling to take the little bit of time, effort, and expense to put forth a production that lives up to the expectations build through years of watching professional television.

Thanks to our friend Janice Brown for bringing this to our attention.

Message to Web Designers: Enough with the Postage-Stamp-Sized Video, Please!

2008-11-15T18:13:21Z

With almost all of our video productions now destined for the web in one way or another, we’re now working with a lot of web designers to encode and prepare video files to work inside their web page designs. And I almost invariably cringe when I get the answer to the question, “How big (width and height, in pixels), would you like the video file to be?

Time after time, the answer comes back as something that is frighteningly tiny. And I know that much of the work that goes into acquiring and tuning a spectacular high-definition image is going to be lost in some web designer’s idea of how big (or small) video should be on a page.

Take, for example, this image grabbed (at actual size) from the Goldman Sachs website:

Yes, that’s our Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in his old job at Goldman. But the point here is that the video window in this huge player — which takes up a whole page to present navigation widgets to get to other videos, plus a transcript of what he’s saying — is so small (204 pixels wide by 108 high, to be precise) that it requires the viewer to squint in order to take it in. This may be (barely) OK for talking heads, but when it comes to actually showing us things in video, the miniscule image is useless.

I’m not sure what it is that drives web designers to make video tiny. It may be that until a few years ago, larger video sized looked awful on web pages. Primitive encoders made the video look chunky. Low bandwidth made it jerky. And the lack of a player standard made it impossible to make video work consistently on all platforms.

But we’re by all that now. The Flash VP6 and H.264 codecs produce gorgeous web video — at least when a knowledgeable producer is at the controls. We can pretty much count on there being 500 kilobits per second of bandwidth available to our viewers. And the ubiquity of Flash on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers (but sadly not on iPhones — wake up, Steve Jobs!) means that we don’t have to confuse viewers with a dizzying choice of “Windows Media, QuickTime, or RealMedia”).

Over time, we’ve become very happy with web video encoded at a size of 480 pixels wide by 270 pixels high (for widescreen productions) and 500 kbps bandwidths. Here’s what it looks like with those specs, applied to a film we recently created for Boston College:

Video like this is experiential, and it’s designed to be viewed immersively. (In fact, the premiere was on a huge high-definition screen.) It’s bad enough that most people will listen to the soundtrack on a tiny laptop speaker; to ask them to squint at a postage-stamp image takes the rest of the experience away.

Bandwidth is increasing rapidly, and so are the expectations of web video viewers. Encoding software is getting better, too, and high-definition web video experiences are already starting to arrive.

So the next time a web designer shows you a web video page design that relegates video to a small window, ask him or her why. You may well find that they’re living with old assumptions that have been shattered by the quality of today’s web video experience.

Case Study: Harvard Business School and the New Art of Web Video Staging

2008-11-12T18:05:00Z

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:

You need to upgrade your Flash Player

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.