The Video View
- About
- Video news elsewhere
- formats in search of audiences
- how short is short?
- Is Hulu more important that Time Warner Cable?
- last.fm and smartclip tie the knot
- MLB.com added to Little Roku
- pre-rolls to help YouTube turn a profit
- UK Commercial TV viewing shows an upswing
- what are the differences between in-stream and in-page video ads?
- why the JK wedding is a successful viral
- Why you need to be using video on your site…
- YouTube finalises revenue share for video partners
- YouTube to turn profit?
Archive for category technology providers
Making online video work harder.
Posted by vaughan in creative, technology providers on November 26, 2009
Matt Kaplan recently posted on Mediapost about the importance of making video advertising work for the web. It is an excellent post and one that many advertisers and agencies should consider before setting out the goals of their campaigns. The advertising equivalent of a 12″ remix is the 1min 15 secs version of an ad that was destined for a 30 second slot on TV. Just because you can post a longer version doesn’t necessarily mean that you should and remember that this is online so people are a click away from being elsewhere.
The creative possibilities within a video are bountiful. From the intrusive ‘CLICK ME I’M SOMETHING DIFFERENT’ to the more subtle ‘you seem to be enjoying watching so why don’t you find out more about me’. The tools are widely available to make a video interactive so it seems like now would be a pretty good time for advertisers and agencies to start using them. One important point that I think Matt misses is that a user who is watching a video ad online will almost always have a mouse in their hand and the advertiser needs to think about whether they want the user to use it or not. Interactivity doesn’t make sense in every situation but where there is an opportunity to pass an engaged user on to the point of purchase then why not let them? If someone is giving you their time to watch an ad on YouTube then they are already a pretty engaged user, why make them go elsewhere to look for the product or service that you want them to find.
This is a picture diary of me growing a moustache for Movember. If I hadn’t included the link to donate within the video then people would have to look elsewhere, email me, go to my Facebook page or hunt me out any other way to find the link. By making the clicking and the donating as easy as possible I think that my video has more value. My donations have gone up as a result of it certainly and that was the KPI that I set out ahead of time so for me this has been a success. It may be time for advertisers to move on from thinking that 10,000 views on YouTube is enough of a success, after all – that’s just TV on a computer.
| Find more reactive videos at coull.com |
Vimeo vs YouTube – David vs Goliath?
Posted by vaughan in regular, technology providers on November 11, 2009
For those of us with enough grey hairs to remember the great browser wars of the 90s some of the recent developments in online video platforms may start to sound a little familiar. If not – bear with me and hopefully I’ll make my case.
from Miss Rogues Flickr Stream
The biggest anti-trust case that was brought against Microsoft was due to the fact that their browser – Internet Explorer – was bundled into the operating system (wikipedia article). This killed off competition as Netscape and Opera fumbled for the keys to the castle while IE was safely ensconced in the great hall eating, drinking and having a ball. IE now has competition and its market share has been steadily dropping as Firefox, Safari and Chrome nibble away at its lead through performance and usability improvements. Microsoft has a dominant position in terms of operating systems for PCs and abused that to stifle innovation at rival companies.
I read this article and it got me thinking. If YouTube is already embedded into a phone or into the new Chrome OS when it debuts, then does that put a rival such as Vimeo into difficulty. There is no doubting that YouTube has a dominant market position with a 40% market share (via Mashable and ComScore). This doesn’t seem dominant until you factor in the fact that the next largest video site has a 2% market share. What YouTube does and says changes the market, for the most part this is beneficial to the user – I like HD, I think annotations are interesting and I like the idea of skippable pre-rolls. In the long term however they are building an unassailable lead that really doesn’t need to be assisted through the bundling of the YouTube player into devices and future operating systems.
I like Vimeo, I think that their product is excellent, it is uncluttered and the place where most people serious about video production place their showcases. Their playback is excellent and the HD seems to be as good as you can make it on a computer screen. Is there a case for bundling Vimeo into an OS? Probably yes. The iPhone population and the Vimeo clientele would seem to form a pretty coupley venn diagram and soon you should see an app for Vimeo. Every android phone comes with YouTube as an embedded app, every Apple TV comes with the ability to watch YouTube videos and the iPhone comes with a YouTube app installed. Does any other video site have the clout of YouTube? No. Can any other video site sign the partnership deals that YouTube can? No. Does that put YouTube in a dominant position? Absolutely, it does.
As a wise man who used to run Sun Microsystems once said ‘Innovation happens elsewhere’, it might be Vimeo, it might be Facebook, Metacafe, Dailymotion or any of the other video sites that out-innovates YouTube in the medium to long term but in the current market YouTube will find it quite easy to maintain its market share.
But as Valuev found out, if you are the biggest guy in the ring, with the heaviest weight and the longest reach then in the long run you can still get beaten by the little guy, even when he’s broken his hand on your head in the second round.
Terminator meets Sooty and Sweep
Posted by vaughan in creative, technology providers on October 22, 2009
The film 9 from Tim Burton and Universal pictures is coming out in a matter of days, with the help of Microsoft you can get a sneaky preview in HD. The film follows an animated sock puppet as he joins with his steampunk brethren to save the world. Kind of like Terminator meets Sooty and Sweep. If you don’t know who Sooty and Sweep are then check here.
Universal are distributing the video through viral specialists Unruly media amongst others and using the Silverlight player. Who knows if Silverlight has a future since even MSN’s video site uses a flash player but the quality is excellent in this clip.
Video advertising – not just for the big boys
Posted by vaughan in creative, technology providers on September 23, 2009
I saw an article on Ad Operations Online about a company called Jivox who have a nice way of helping local businesses to get a video ad online.
In a simple process you can upload your video, add some calls to action and specify how much you want to spend on media costs. Of course the creatives are basic but then if you are a small business advertising on local sites then maybe you don’t need an incredible creative – just a way to get your message across.
If you click on the image and watch the video then I guarantee that you’ll want to go and visit iFly next time you are in Hollywood – that looks like a lot of fun! The message can only really be delivered through using video, text with a still image just wouldn’t cut it. It will be interesting to see if the service has longevity, the long tail can yield great results when managed effectively i.e. not managed at all but entirely self service so I think that it should do well. The challenge will be to make sure that the results are what the advertiser needs in order to justify the money that they’ll have to spend on using it.
VAST, VPAID, VAUGHAN*
Posted by vaughan in regular, technology providers on September 8, 2009
via Admonsters
The IAB in the US has been working with some of the luminaries of the the online industry to try and make standards available which help the whole video advertising value chain to get along in the hope that this will allow the market to move on with technology discussions and move us forward to discussions of the creativity that the formats should allow.
Why are standards important? Without them the whole business just becomes too complicated to be worth it, with them the efficiency increases – campaigns online quicker, creatives better able to use the channel, reports more consistent and containing better data. This is a benefit for advertisers looking for the lost or dispersed TV audience, the media owners who are hoping to maximise the payback on their content and the agencies who try to deliver better results every time.
In order to make it as easy as possible – VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) makes it easy for an ad-server to deliver an ad into a player, the response from the ad-server follows a standard format to let the player know what is coming – is it linear or non-linear, will there be a companion banner, etc.
VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) makes it easy for the video player to understand how it is supposed to work while the ad is playing so that the content isn’t compromised and also tells the ad what size it needs to be to maximise the use of the space available.
Many of the large online video technology companies are involved in the development of the standards such as Freewheel, Eyewonder, DoubleClick and Eyeblaster along with the video media owners Turner, Hulu, MTV and Google. Hopefully the Digital Video Committee can keep the momentum that they have been building and get everyone along for the ride.
*As for VAUGHAN (Video Advertising’s Ungainly Group Hug Afficianado + Note-taker) – I have trademarked it but will licence it to the IAB when they run out of others. (Gag suggested by a certain Mr Philpot – now of AdForm)
JW Players – ‘Like Wordpress for Video’
Posted by vaughan in technology providers on August 12, 2009
If you have a site that has a video player – the chances are that you will have heard of the JW Players. There are versions for wmv or flv and a desktop variant is available too. They are known and loved by many people in the industry for their low cost, easy to implement and easy to customise nature. As someone once described them to me ‘they’re like Wordpress for video’. As such they have been used by thousands of sites.
The success of the player is great but what I think is really interesting is the potential value of this installed base. This is where the Longtail network comes in. If you have an installed player on thousands of sites then the potential for advertising around the video content is considerable. Many of the sites will be incredibly narrow in focus which doesn’t hold much interest for a large advertiser who only cares about the mass market but for a niche advertiser who really wants to hit a target market then this could pay dividends.
Through using the Longtail AdSolution a site can embed a tag from any network or adserver into their player thus opening up the video on their site to advertisers, all this with a self-serve reporting and management system. It sounds good and reports are that it is good. In the UK Longtail are partnered with a couple of different ad networks – Adconion and Adpepper but the system will take tags from Tremor, YuMe, DoubleClick In-Stream and others.
For people with video-heavy sites the prospect of earning some ad-funds from the content is very attractive and this should be possible as long as the advertisers can find the audiences that they want as often as they want.
Omniture now does video tracking
Posted by vaughan in technology providers on August 11, 2009
Everyone knows that the amount of video being viewed online is going up but how do you prove that for an individual site? For the benefit of their sites and content – this is pretty useful information but as in this case with Crackle – it also helps to sell to the advertisers that support the site and make all the content possible. Check here for the Omniture blog post about it.
If you don’t know Omniture then it is worth spending a few minutes undertanding what they do. They measure website performance in amongst a few other things. If they are really starting to take video seriously then I think that that is a good thing. After all – in online advertising it is very hard to sell what you cannot measure and if one of the larger site analytics companies starts to make video measurement as easy as possible then that will be a benefit to the industry.
The majority of the video ad-serving companies will provide measurements about any in-stream ads that are shown but site analytics can be used to measure the actual content, the challenge is making the data make sense to the people that need it. In order to do this they have come up with the concept of ROV (Return on Video), the basic premise of this is – is it worth us renewing a certain show or not. If a show is popular then maybe it should be promoted differently to an unpopular one. There is no point pumping programming dollars into a show that no-one really wants to watch after all.
