Streaming Video

“No more long, cumbersome marketing documents – no more boring presentations. Video is how companies and business should communicate." 

That's a pretty powerful quote, especially coming from IBM. They're not talking about online commercials, rather web-based video content that helps feed information to their key audiences. They're replacing old-school business practices of creating binders of typed prose with online marketing, communication and training videos.  

Recently Stacy let loose on one of my pet peeves - people (marketers) who don't take advantage of opportunities handed to them. She wrote about video marketing with a used car salesman feel, especially around streaming commercial content (i.e., your favorite tv shows online).

Since reading her post, I've been on a mission to find an example of how things should be done.

MD Anderson Cancer Center took full advantage of their opportunity to educate and engage the viewers of ABC's 20/30. Before the show started, the spot featured a woman talking about being diagnosed with cancer and the uncertainty is presented in her life. The next commercial break told more of her story - talking about how she came to find the best facility and doctors for her case. Each spot continued her story, drawing me in to care about her, her outcome and those who committed to helping her regain her health.

In addition to the continuing, compelling story (not the same tired spot over and over as in Stacy's case), the video player allowed me to view other people's stories by creating a playlist of related content. The compelling story got my attention and the player allowed me to engage as much as I wanted.

And, of course... I grabbed a couple tissues and watched a few more of their series.

How am I supposed to maintain a good work ethic during the World Cup? It's hard enough simply knowing that there are games being played. Games with an intensity that comes along once every four years. Games on DAILY.  

With people realizing the importance of online video production and the fact that I work for a company like Cantaloupe TV... I am able to stream these daily matches. Watching them right at my desk, live nonetheless. 

Wow! Internet video is a powerful beast.

USA all-the-way! 

“I'm shaking all over. I was just interviewed for my company’s online marketing video, and my mind froze. I couldn't remember even simple concepts. I was stumbling all over myself. I had stage fright. It was an embarrassment.”

Public speaking and being recorded are common fears. Never mind that the videos produced for you by Cantaloupe are not live, will be edited to present your best possible image and messages and the interviews can be shot repeatedly to capture you at your best, this can still be a nerve-wracking process. Relax.  

Below are a few common questions that often help the characters (interviewees) during our video production shoots.

When will I receive the script? I’m not good at memorizing lines, by the way. Our authentic story telling format alleviates the need for scripts. Our producers will ask you questions in a conversational style. Talk from your heart and as if we are your client, friend or employee.

Which way to wardrobe and makeup? Again, think authentic. We want to see you how you are everyday. If you wear a suit and tie to work, wear a suit and tie to the video shoot. If you wear jeans and carry a hard hat, that’s how we want to see you.

What if I don’t know an answer or my mind freezes during the interview? Let the producer know that you are unsure, need to consult the notes you smuggled into the room with you or need a minute to regroup. Our goal is to make you and your company look good.  
You know your material – you live it everyday. Whether the video is for a new product launch, an internal message to key employees or an opportunity to showcase your company to new prospects through interactive marketing - your streaming video is about you. Take a deep breath and speak from your heart. You’ll look mahvuhlus!

If you have other questions, please ask your producer, project manager or client success manager anytime.

Video formatting is a complicated subject to understand, especially when you aren't in the video business. That's one of the reasons why we are here at Cantaloupe -- to help you make the most of your online video. Let me explain a little more.

I came across a web video a couple of days ago. The picture was stretched and pixelated (meaning boxy, unclear), and the sound was unbearable. To say the least, this video looked and felt unprofessional. If you are going to put video on your website, you want it to look sharp. If you disagree, let me know. It doesn't matter how great your site is, if their is one ugly video on their, it could ruin the entire experience. Here is an example snapshot of a video that is poorly posted to the internet:



Like I said, the video is stretched and pixelated, and the one I watched was jumpy (caused by a really low framerate). There are also two black bars on the sides of the video for no reason. Another thing that catches the eye is the video player. It is clunky and not very functional. There are a small amount of options, and a few a them I would never even use. I know this seems extreme, but search the internet and you will find videos similar to this image. So, now that I've addressed this poor video and poor web video player, let me talk about what Cantaloupe offers in these areas.

Cantaloupe's videos are always great quality, and look professional. We also have launched our own web video platform called Backlight that will do the online FLV Conversion for you and give you our sharp looking and great functioning video player. If you want to learn more about everything it can offer you, go here.

Now, let's look at a few snapshots of a Cantaloupe video so we can all vizualize this. These are from our most recent CantaSeries video.




The videos are clear, even the text. You can make it full screen, higher or lower the volume to any level, or use the menu to share, embed, or link to the video. There is much more the software can do, including tracking and converting, so I would suggest looking further into it.

If you are looking to strengthen your online video marketing, give us a holler and we will help you out. We shoot everything in High Definition, expanding the possiblities, and are constantly working on updates for our software, Backlight, which will eventually include HD internet streaming of your online videos. Of course, we know story and content are of utmost importance, which we also deliver, but don't underestimate the quality.

It seems Bluelock has found a way to establish themselves as experts in cloud computing, and it seems a big part of that is their internet video marketing strategy.

I recently wrote a post about how their videos have shown up on a social network for cloud computing. Now it seems that someone else has grabbed the embed code for their LEGO demonstration of server virtualization and embedded it in their blog.

The ability to let others grab this video and spread it around is made possible through Backlight, Cantaloupe's online video platform. What kind of impact is this video having on Bluelock's business? Well, Bluelock can see exactly how many views their getting from this video placement by checking out the online video analytics report also provided through Backlight.

Another valuable feature is Bluelock's ability to change the ads in this video, that is, to change in-stream calls to actions. Even though this video is already embedded, Bluelock can control and change the message to viewers. (Check out the 2:20 mark in the video) Now they can actually convert these viewers into prospects or even customers.

I also think it's worth mentioning this quote from the blog:

I think you do. And if I'm wrong, tell me in the comments section. I'll approve it.

The reason I ask is because eMarketer says "Most of their (B2B Marketers') targets—businesspeople—don’t have audio turned on in the office. Talking heads or voiceovers that no one hears are not very effective."

I wish they had evidence to support that most businesspeople don't have audio turned on, but I think they assume it's an unquestionable fact. Of course company-issued computers don't come with speakers or have audio that can be turned on. Why would they let you have such a distraction?

I don't have evidence to the contrary, but does anyone else find that hard to believe? I would expect most SMB's to not bother regulating audio, and even if most people thought it prudent to regulate themselves and turn off audio, they'd still have the option to turn it on to watch an online video.

SMB's make up a larger part of the market, but I even wonder how many large companies don't allow audio. Can anyone speak from experience?

In any case, the feature discussed in the article - online video subtitles - is actually quite useful, but I think more so for video search engine optimization (Video SEO) than for accomodating users without audio. (although the statistics they present about increase in average video completion rates are quite convincing)

We haven't yet added captions to Backlight, Cantaloupe.tv's own online video platform, but it's high on our list. We may preach about using streaming video instead of text on your website, but we can't deny that the two play together well.

There has been a lot of talk about Obama finally bringing the age of digital communications to the White House, whether it's the hoopla around his Blackberry, questions about who has access to his email address, or the addition of streaming video to his weekly public addresses.

It doesn't seem any of that is going to change; however, what is going to change is White House's video hosting service, video management system, and online video player.

According to this report, the White House will no longer be using YouTube for online video hosting. Instead, they've opted to go with a generic video player using Akamai as the content delivery network.

Why the switch? It seems no one knows for sure, but the prevailing speculation is that the White House was unhappy with YouTube's privacy policy, which left tracking cookies on viewers computers, even if they never played the video.

Here is Obama's weekly address in the new online video player (You need to click through. Their new video player doesn't embed well)

Reel SEO is a blog site that provides the most insightful, interesting, and useful information out there about video search engine optimization. Recently, they decided to make it easy to find all of their most popular posts on Video SEO tips and techniques.

One of these posts lists the top video search sites. I thought it'd be helpful to spread this information to all my readers. You can see the full list here, but below is a list of the top video search sites by Alexa rank:

1. Yahoo Video
2. Google Video
3. Windows Live Video
4. MSN Video
5. AOL Video

Do you need a video management system that makes it easy to push your video to all these search sites? Then check out Backlight 2.0, a platform for managing all of your online video content.

Hi, my name is Justin.  Here at Cantaloupe we care about blah blah blah blah blah blah.

That's about how far people pay attention when they hear that type of messaging.  It's old and tired as two dollar...car wash.  This is where web video can really be a powerful agent for you.

Break down the walls of your business.  Don't tell people who you are and what you do.  Let clients SEE you as people, and SEE what you do. 

One of my favorite video magazines to date is RJE Business Interior's.  They knew that they have a great staff and decided to show that firsthand to the world (wide web).  Check out their magazine here rjefurn.com. 

Internet marketing is all about the truth, and nothing is more truthful than a streaming video about a day in the life of your staff.

Justin Gutwein

With the launch of CloudFront earlier this week, Amazon continued its migration toward becoming a technology-focused company.  "Amazon is at its heart a technology company," said Andrew Jassey, senior vice president of Web services, during a talk at the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase. "We just happened to do retail first."  With its pay-as-you-go pricing strategy, Amazon's model sets it apart by eliminating up-front commitments and long-term contracts, which should appeal to smaller firms that specialize in interactive marketing and streaming video. 

While it is well positioned within the rapidly growing cloud computing market, Amazon's success and original focus center on the consumer retail segment, and my concerns lie in the strategic organizational shift outside its historically successful core competency.  CloudFront's customer base has grown quickly so these concerns appear misgiven but only time, and profits, will tell if the strategic shift is truly good for the company.

Now, I know instant messengers have been used by some marketers as a channel for reaching customers, but I only ever saw it used in a B2C environment, and then, only a couple times.

Why didn't it ever catch on in the B2B world as anything more than an internal communication tool? Why didn't we ask people for their IM name and put our own on our business cards like we do with email addresses?

What prompted this thought was Google's recent video feature addition to Gmail (Google adds voice and video chat to gmail)

I've used video chat internally with Apple's iChat, but Google's entry into this space spurred me to think about what relevance this live online streaming video feature has for B2B marketers. At Cantaloupe, the majority of our work is done in the space of website video firms. We're starting to see more and more branching out of where our clients want to distribute web video, but up to this point, the website has been the most popular place. Chat poses an interesting opportunity...

I know this will be a disappointment to all of you, but this post just contains questions not answers. I'm going to think a little more about this and post some more thoughts over the next couple days.

As anyone from Indiana can tell you, we're teeming with great universities in the Hoosier state. I won't begin to mention them for fear of leaving one out, but you'd be hard pressed to find another state with so many notable public and private institutions for higher education, each of them being known for their strength in a particular field.
One such school, Ball State University, has a communications program that's achieved much notoriety (and not just because late night tv show host David Letterman graduated from there).

At Cantaloupe.tv we're particularly interested in what they're doing with web video, a category within their emerging media studies. The latest is a series of student produced "webisodes" called "Evenly Odd."

"Webisode" refers to a type of online streaming video or if you prefer, online tv media, and as you probably guessed, it derives from combining "web" and "episode." (a naming technique I just found out that's referred to as a "portmanteau". Yes, despite my video ties I'm a geek for words)

Webisodes are essentially what we're creating when we create videos for online video magazines. The difference in the naming is that we liken our web video production to magazines, while "webisode" users prefer the tv metaphor.

It's great to see Ball State empower their students with skills for web video production, which will undoubtedly prove valuable in what is truly an emerging media. I wouldn't doubt that by the time these students have a foothold in their careers, online video production and online video will be the norm, and cable tv will be a relic of the past.

As usual, the Wall Street Journal is a little late in reporting online marketing trends, and especially, online video marketing trends. (understandably, the Wall Street crowd probably isn't responsible for staying on the bleeding edge of web video) 
However, when the Wall Street Journal does report on something, you better be up to speed because your competitors probably are. This time, the WSJ is reporting on where to look to find video on the web other than YouTube and they point out a few shortcomings of the popular video aggregator. (If you follow this blog, you'll probably remember one of the shortcomings I noted)

While the article is mostly concerned with trying to find popular TV shows and other online TV media, it illustrates that video is everywhere on the internet, and the places you can find it (or distribute it) are as diverse as the reasons for producing video in the first place.

So if you've been wondering whether your organization should be putting video on YouTube, it's probably time to broaden your horizons when it comes to website video marketing. For examples on how Cantaloupe.TV helps clients put video on websites check out our Video Magazines page.


 

The answer is: enough that most marketers should be discouraged from using YouTube as their only means for distributing online video. If you market to business professionals and you're truly serious about your internet video marketing strategy then you have to find an online video platform other than YouTube for posting and distributing your video on the internet (might I suggest giving Cantaloupe.TV a look?)

DH Communications conducted a small, but intriguing survey on web video and the use of YouTube in the workplace. The sample size of the study is too small for me to feel completely confident in the figures (90 anonymous people), but it is the best fact based information I've found to date about the restricting of internet video use in the workplace.

Some of the key findings:

• Over 33% of companies restrict access to YouTube
• 90% of those companies that restrict access to YouTube DO NOT restrict access to streaming video on websites or blogs
• "Uses too much bandwidth" was the biggest reason for restricting access
• 63.3% do watch YouTube during work hours

I think it's also important to note that 75% of the respondents worked for small companies (less than 250 people), meaning it's not just huge corporations that are blocking their employees from YouTube.

If you are a B2B marketer this has to be the strongest argument for why you can't rely on only YouTube as your internet video player and distributor. Go ahead and put it out there if you have the time and inclination, but it should be an extra, not your whole strategy.

This blog post started out as a question, a plea for answers about communicating with text versus communicating with video. I may make a living off of selling streaming video, but as an avid reader I know video isn't always the best way to communicate your message.

But when is video the best, and when is text the better option?

I could give you my opinion, but I don't want opinions, I want facts. Surely someone has studied this? I've scoured the internet for a long time and turned up nothing until just now when I took one last ditch effort to find something to help me write this post. What did I find?....

Recall of Information Presented in Text vs. Multimedia Format a study by Eyetrack III

The experiment was simple. They presented the same news story in both text and multimedia (video) to different people and then gave them the same quiz to test what they recalled. Here are their findings:

• Overall, we found a slight, marginally significant difference in how test subjects correctly recalled story information that was presented in text vs. using multimedia. When asked to recall information about names and places, participants who received information in text were more likely to answer questions correctly.
• However, information about a process or procedure that was unfamiliar to them was more correctly recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.
• Users who received information in text form seemed to have better recall of specific factual information.
• There was no significant difference between men and women when it came to recall of information presented in text or multimedia format.

This study isn't the end all be all. In fact, I think it focuses on a very narrow purpose of communicating and we communicate for a lot of reasons. For one, it only focuses on journalistic storytelling, and two, it only measures the recall of information To that point, the report says:

"It also is important to remember that information recall probably is not your only goal. User satisfaction and overall understanding also are important to any good piece of journalism, and these aspects were not tested in this study."

Still more work to be done and there's probably a better book (or video?) out there that sums up the differences. If not, then perhaps it's time someone produces one.

What kind of expert in internet video marketing would I be if I didn't share with you that Google can now automatically generate text from the audio in your internet videos and make it searchable?

The truth is, I've been sitting on this information for a couple weeks now. I just haven't been sure what to make of it.

The benefits are obvious. Search engines still rely nearly 100% on text to create relevant search results. Up until now, optimizing web video for search meant including the right text with the video. The obvious next step was finding a way to use speech recognition technology to convert the audio content that is already there to searchable text. The next step after that is making the image content searchable. (Which is well on its way. Here's an article)

What's been holding me back from talking more about this is I don't know what Google plans to do with this technology. Right now, your streaming video is only audio searchable if you upload it to YouTube (and actually, for the time being they're still testing the technology only on political videos).

YouTube is an amazing tool and has pioneered the online video industry, but it isn't always the best answer when marketing online with video. For one, the video quality output is too poor to use to put video on websites. And while YouTube does offer some video analytics, it's not as robust or as useful to business marketers as it needs to be or as you see with other video platforms.

At this point using YouTube for video marketing is a little like using hotmail for email marketing.

But at the end of the day, Google Audio Indexing (aka GAudi) is a monumental advancement for not just video marketing, but for search engine marketing as well. Everyone interested in either area should take 5 minutes and check out GAudi's FAQ page.

Any rational, data driven marketer will wonder at some point in their career if there is any data to support the best day and time to send out an email.

The answer is yes there is. The bad news is, if it's generally available to everybody, then its practically useless to you.

A recent article in a SubscriberMail newsletter highlights the problem:

"...vacation days, summer hours and busy weekend schedules tend to put a dent in the performance of emails sent on Friday through Monday. However, this knowledge has scared many email marketers completely away from mailing on non-peak days, leading to three days of crowded inboxes around the world during the middle of each week."

They also point out that the biggest obstacle to getting your email read isn't picking the right day or time, but giving the most relevant, desired content.

With that in mind, are you doing anything to differentiate your email marketing? Have you thought about adding online video to the mix to see if streaming video is a more desired medium for consuming your content?

It's amazing to me how the many years of being taught how to watch TV when the networks wanted me to has been so quickly defused by the new age and ease of online video. 

My mind never sleeps when it comes to thinking about the the value of internet video marketing and it's place in the countless online marketing tools today's marketers have available to them.

Whether you consider blogs, email marketing, SEO, online advertising, streaming video, social networks, or even Twitter just to name a few, marketers have innumerable options - and that's just online.

So when one takes a step back and really considers why he/she should use video marketing, he/she has to ask, what can video do for me online that nothing else can?

Rather than embark on a tiresome bullet point list, I'm just going to give you one today.

Video finally brings the notion of "our people are our product" to the internet age.

What do I mean? Well it's as simple as thinking about buying clothing online. Would you ever consider buying a pair of shoes online without first seeing a picture of them?

Of course not and online retailers like Zappos.com know this, which is why they offer not only one picture, but at least 8 different views, including a bottom side view.

Let's say you're firm is a consultancy, or a law firm, or an agency, or any other service firm where the primary thing being sold is the knowledge, helpfulness, and skills of people. Then, what would it mean to show the bottom side view of your product?

I can promise you one thing. It'd be difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate all views of your people-based product with just pictures. Unlike shoes, people have expressions, they have tone of voice, and they have gestures. All of these are critical attributes about your product.

So if you say people are your product, have you brought your product to the internet age with streaming video on your website?