Video Hosting Service

Check out this article by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) on crisis communication.

There big takeaway, and I quote exactly: "Video dominates as online communications tool"

The article goes on to say:
Organizations need to already have an established video channel that informs — or entertains — your key publics so that you have built an audience and goodwill before a crisis hits. Having an online Web presence will increase the speed of distribution and reach of your crisis response.

This is exactly what our online video magazines at Cantaloupe.tv do. We specialize in producing authentic, online video content which is the exactly what you need when communicating a crisis situation. And our web video platform, Backlight.tv, makes it easy to get that video up immediately.

The last thing you want to be worried about in a crisis is about how to get your video online. Backlight handles everything you need to get that video up immediately. Things you don't need to worry about with Backlight:

• The file type. We handle mov conversion, mp4 conversion, mpeg conversion, flv conversion, and more
• The online video player. Backlight provides you with that as well as an easy to use embed code
• Online video hosting service. That's also included out of the box.
• Distribution. Backlight helps you get your video on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, email campaigns, Twitter, partner websites, or wherever else you distribute online
• Video analytics. Backlight provides you with all the online video tracking you'll need to determine the effectiveness of your story.

So don't wait for a crisis to hit before you start thinking about online video marketing and the video platform you need to distribute it. Take a look at our offering now.

I've talked about video search engine optimization many times before, but one question that keeps coming up is does where I get my online video hosting affect my search engine optimization?

Our stance right now (and it's always subject to change since Google is in a constant state of flux, always trying to improve its service), is it does not matter where your video is hosted. It is not necessary to host your video on your own servers or even on your own domain to get the authority credit for your domain or to get your video to show up in Google's universal search.

Additionally, there are big advantages to not hosting your video yourself, like the ability to utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which ensures an optimal viewing experience.

This is one of the tips that Mark Robertson, the Founder of ReelSEO a blog about "video search optimization, online video marketing, internet video advertising, and everything else related to online video" gives to his readers. He gives 9 other tips in a recent post titled "Web Video Marketing - 10 Common Marketing Mistakes" that I recommend all my readers check out. (Note: You'll see some back and forth comments I had with Mark about the subject of this post)

Twitmatic, is a real-time, online video search engine that looks exclusively for tweets that contain videos. This isn't just another video hosting service, Twitmatic actually allows users to scan the Twitter public timeline in real-time and find videos that were tweeted about even seconds before. Why should you care? Because this represents yet another way to distribute your videos to a receptive audience in yet another case of permission marketing.

A few of Twitmatic's features:

• Search functionality whereby you can search up to 3 terms
• In the sidebar, you can now perform a number of different functions, including:
  • Choosing list view vs. video view (seen above)
  • View twitter trends and can click on these to see video results that match.
  • View all videos being shared on Twitter in a real-time timeline
• Follow or unfollow twitter users, reply to tweets, view tweets from the associated user, and bookmark favorite videos
• If you sign in as a user, your searches will be saved automatically.
• If you perform a search that returns no matches, once they are found, they will appear on your saved searches

How does Twitmatic know your tweet contains a video?
It's not just searching for the word video. It's actually more sophisticated than that. Below is a answer given by Greg, one of the co-founders of Twitmatic.

"Some of the technology I can’t get into but basically we are able to take a tweet, find an http url in it, and then process the web content at the other end of the url. The process then pulls out likely videos and pushes them into our system. There are current limitations to our technology due to certain sites disabling embedding or utilizing advanced flash techniques.  We parse the public timeline as well as do specific general searches to find many of the videos. We also depend on user searches to bring in other videos."

This is good to know because we can continue to use link shortening software like bit.ly to continue and track the number of clicks on our links.

What does this mean for you?
Along with the video SEO that you are currently targeting for Google, Twitmatic is another channel for users to find your video without you really having to do anything other than share your videos through Twitter.

Does this really work?
Here is a look at the Twitmatic interface after I searched for Vontoo who is a current Cantaloupe client that had a couple of people share their video via Twitter.




Best results?
If you already have a Twitter account, make it a habit of tweeting links to your online marketing videos. If you already have a whole library of videos ready to share, it mike make sense to start dripping out tweets to links to those videos.

You'll also want to give a lot of consideration to what "keywords" you put in the tweet. Twitmatic is so new that we can't give you definitive advice here, but we'll continue to experiment and let you know.

Not only is Bluelock one of our clients, they are also a leader in "cloud computing," which at Cantaloupe we clearly get since our very own online video platform brings all kinds of cool things to the cloud like a video hosting service, video conversion online (many types including but not limited to mov conversion, mp4 conversion, flv conversion, mpeg conversion), video analytics, video uploading etc.

Well here is an example of how Bluelock has leveraged their videos to further their demonstration of expertise in the field of cloud computing. Using Backlight, they've embedded their videos into a community site specifically for networking around cloud computing.

What's really cool about this is that because the videos are embedded using Backlight, Bluelock maintains control over the messaging in the videos.

What do I mean? Check out the 56 second mark in the first video. Bluelock has inserted a video "ad" with a link back their website. This is the perfect way to convert otherwise casual viewers into potential customers.

There's no shortage of ways that Backlight can help you get more use and value out of your videos. Check out a demo today to see what Backlight can do for you.

One of the problems with using YouTube as your online video platform for marketing your organization is that you give up control. You not only give up rights to the ownership of your content, but you also give up control of what's displayed around or with your content.

What do I mean?

Well let's take an example of where you upload your video to YouTube, someone finds it, actually watches it on YouTube's site. A prominent feature on the video page is the "Related Videos" section displayed to the right of the video.

Most of the time, these videos are harmless or even helpful, but every now and again you might get something you wish wasn't "related" to your video. We actually had a prospect who had this internet video show up next to his:


It gets even worse...

He used YouTube's free online video player to embed the video on his website and this video even showed up as a "related" video at the end.

Free online video hosting services and players like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, etc. are cheap and quick to implement for embedding single videos, but like most online tools created for individuals, they don't fit the needs of businesses and organizations.

For that you need an online video management tool like Backlight. Designed and developed with marketers in mind, it's perfectly suited for organizations who want to grow their businesses through the power of online video. Check out other ways that Backlight can make it easy to execute on your online video strategy.

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)

And we’re back with more trends and how they correlate with what we’re doing here at Cantaloupe.  In another report, Tech and Web Trends Predictions 2008 (link here) by Trendsspotting, top technology professionals and influencers give their take on what they think is cooking up for 2008.  Some trends are already evident and the others have great potential for making there stand before 2009 rolls around. 

Quick overview of the report:

“Out” in 2008:

-       TV and DVR
-       Data web
-       Analog
-       Piracy
-       YouTube embedded
-       Broadcast and cable TV ads by 2010
-       Amateur content
-       XP

“In” in 2008:

      -         TV on the net
-       Gen X and Y on mobile web
-        Mobile messaging
-       Information-based businesses
-       Customer as innovator
-       Web gadgets
-       Online delivery models
-       Peoples web
-       Online video/internet TV
-       Personalization
-       Quality, speed
-       Unified communication, voice and video
-       Video blogs
-       Video search
-       Branded professional online video

Some of these don’t have much to do with Cantaloupe to be honest (i.e. mobile messaging, XP, Piracy).  But lots of the other trends sure do:

How we measure up with what’s “out”:
-       If TV is “out,” people have to watch it somewhere – ONLINE.
-       We don’t promote, overloading your web visitors with just plain data, we like the idea of using internet video marketing and telling your stories and messages through a compelling, entertaining medium.
-       Analog is definitely out – digital is the way to go.
-       Not everyone wants to have their videos hosted and played on YouTube,  Custom-developed framework allows individuals and companies to surround their videos with their own branding.  That's one perk to having professional hosting/video playing.  Cantaloupe already does that for clients.
-       As broadcast and cable ads become more and more useless (thanks DVR), reliance on online video and interactive marketing will increase.
-       More and more, viewers of online video want to see professional content, no more amateur stuff.  Our digital video production is all about being professional.  Professional without the absurd price tag.

How we measure up with what’s “in”:
-       All we do is TV on the net.  That’s what we’re about: online video magazines.
-       We like to think our customers are innovators.  The best part about the video-making process is story development.  You’d be amazed with how innovative our clients can be during the process – even the ones who don’t think they have a creative bone in their bodies.  Take a look.
-       The web is a people’s web.  It’s my web; it’s your web.  We’re bettering it every day. 
-       Online video and Internet TV again – yep, that’s what we’re here for.
-       Personalization – our videos are about getting personal with you and your business. We want to hear your passions and your triumphs.  We want to show your database exactly what you’re doing for them.
-       Our videos are high quality and we finish them and get them to you in a fraction of the time it takes big expensive studies to do the same.
-       Video blogs are popular because people like to hear what’s going on… on an ongoing basis.  We help you create an ongoing conversation with your database to keep them in the loop and better your relationships.
-       You want branded professional online video?  You got it.  Just give us a call.