Marketpath adds video management capabilities with Cantaloupe's VideoHere

Wednesday, June 30, 2010 by Diana Caldwell
Marketpath's Content Management System and Video Management Software from Cantaloupe.tv provide users a more engaging experience.


Content management solution provider Marketpath, Inc. has just announced the addition of VideoHere to its SaaS web content management solution. This integration offers Marketpath users the ability to seamlessly utilize video in their web pages therefore providing highly relevant and engaging content. VideoHere allows users to point-and-click to upload, customize, embed, and track videos in their web pages. It is licensed from Cantaloupe.TV, LLC, an online video solutions company that provides an end-to-end solution for marketing with online video.

Directly from their Marketpath account, customers can easily manage a video library, add video to web pages, and track video metrics. Users can upload MP4, MOV, FLV, MPEG, WMV, and AVI videos to an online video library. Further, impressions, clicks, views, drop-offs, view times, and viral sharing can be measured so that marketers know how their videos perform.

“Adding video to web pages provides website visitors a more engaging experience and allows marketers to better meet their goals,” says Matt Zentz, CEO of Marketpath. “Studies show that 65% of viewers watch online video to completion, while less than 10% read a text-only site in its entirety. Keeping visitors glued to their content helps companies better deliver a message to their intended target.  VideoHere is a powerful tool to help ensure that our client’s audiences engage more deeply and longer on their websites.  And with Marketpath’s VideoHere integration, it is now just as easy to add video to your website as it has always been to add images and image galleries to landing pages.” 

Other added advantages of VideoHere are that an online marketer is able to enhance SEO efforts and also increase their social media footprint. VideoHere includes an out of the box tool that tags videos for search engines, and the video player includes features which allow the viewer to easily share videos with their network and post to social media outlets.

“Videos are delivered to viewers via well known and respected Content Delivery Networks, ensuring the best viewing experience possible,” says Stacy Billanti, Cantaloupe’s President. “Marketpath customers will now have an advantage over their competition by being able to effectively and easily use video in their websites. Further, they will have access to a video hosting library that is reliable and scalable to support large spikes in web traffic.” 

Inside INdiana Business partners with Cantaloupe.TV, LLC to provide leading edge online video content

Friday, May 21, 2010 by Diana Caldwell

Leading Indiana news provider and video services and software provider combine to offer viewers dynamic video content

Cantaloupe.TV, LLC, has just announced a partnership with the leader in Indiana business news and video content, Inside INdiana Business, to provide an enhanced video experience for its online viewers. Cantaloupe.TV is an online video services and software company headquartered in Indianapolis, IN. The partnership allows Inside INdiana Business to provide leading edge video viewing capabilities through its website via Cantaloupe’s online video platform, Backlight.

“Cantaloupe offers an outstanding video management, hosting, and analytics platform for our viewers,” explains Gerry Dick, President of Grow Indiana Media Ventures, the parent company of Inside INdiana Business. “It is easy to integrate into our website and allows our viewers greater access to high quality videos. Our partnership with Cantaloupe will enhance our position as the Indiana leader in video content.” With Backlight, Cantaloupe offers a software platform that takes the guesswork out of online video, making it easier for media companies and businesses to manage their video library, incorporate video content in their online properties, and track its success.

Cantaloupe worked closely with another one of Inside INdiana Business’ partners, Bitwise Solutions, for the rollout of Backlight. “We recommended Cantaloupe’s Backlight product as a good fit to incorporate into the customized media website solution built by BitWise Solutions. Integrating the Backlight product into the website not only extends the video capabilities desired to benefit site visitors, but also allows Inside INdiana Business to continue making the updates themselves,” says Curt Franke, Vice President of Business Development for BitWise Solutions.

“Inside INdiana Business is a natural fit for our online video platform,” says Stacy Billanti, Cantaloupe’s president. “The user will be able to view and engage with videos easily, and Inside INdiana Business will be able to point-and-click to embed videos into the website, upload pre-roll advertising video, track video activity, as well as manage all of its online video content in a single library.”

Common Web Video Mistakes :: Using YouTube the Wrong Way

Monday, May 17, 2010 by Trena Roush
 YouTube is a popular and effective distribution channel for your interactive marketing videos - especially those you hope to go viral. But it is just that - a distribution channel. It is not your far-reaching online video platform solution for video hosting, publishing, distribution and measurement. I digress... YouTube is an effective distribution channel and a great way to drive traffic back to your site.

We've already talked about SEO as it relates to getting your website and your online video messages found - getting found is critical, yes? Yes. Think about the other factors in getting a high placement on a search results page - number of visits, relevant content throughout a site, Google Page Rank (specifically for Google searches).

Think about this - YouTube gets millions of page views a day and has a high Google Page Rank (9). When someone searches the web to find a video tagged with your keywords, do you think they'll end up on your company's website, surrounded by your messaging and calls to action or do you think they'll end up on YouTube, surrounded by other distractions or worse - your competitors' videos and offerings?

YouTube is a good distribution channel, but is no substitute for good web marketing practices, well produced and well tagged videos provided to your customers on your website, and through your controlled distribution methods.

Common Web Video Mistakes :: Not Using A Video Host

Friday, May 14, 2010 by Trena Roush
One common mistake that marketers make with their web videos is believing that a server is a server is a server. If you want your site visitors or employees to be able to access something - a video, a document, pages of content - all you have to do is post it /somewhere/ on the Internet and viola! Right? Well, not so much.

Most web servers are not optimized for video playback. Additionally, the bandwidth required to play a video - especially a popular or viral one - can put a strain on your website. As we've touched on before, your offline and online marketing materials represent your company.

Make sure that your web videos are hosted with a reliable source who is ready to handle the unique demands video brings to the technical environment. The cost of doing this right is small, but the stakes are high when it comes to delivering a quality experience to your video viewers.

More thoughts on internet video marketing for crisis communication

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 by Brennan Knotts
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.

Using internet video in crisis marketing

Tuesday, July 14, 2009 by Brennan Knotts
If you have ever experienced dowtime at a hosting provider whether you're hosting something as trivial as a personal webiste that only your mom has ever vistited, or something as critical as a enterprise SaaS application that 1 million clients rely on every day, you know how frustrating it can be. No one can deliver 100% uptime, but they get so close that we come to expect it and take it for granted.

What is often the most frustrating is not knowing when the service will come back up or what exactly caused it in the first place. After the fact, these hosting providers are left to figure out how to best make amends with their customers and to restore faith in their hosting abilities.

This is where online video production and internet video marketing can help.

Take for instance Rackspace. Rackspace recently had two outages, one on June 29th and one on July 7th. They responded the best way they could have. They not only fixed the problem and made efforts to ensure that it never happens - they actually took the time to put the CEO on camera to explain this to us.

You can see the video below and also check out this blog post by Lifeline Data Centers.



Does it matter where my video is hosted for SEO?

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 by Brennan Knotts
confusedRecently at Cantaloupe.tv, we've had some great conversations with clients who are trying to figure out this emerging world of video seo.

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)

How are people going to find the videos I share through Twitter?

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 by Dusty Koekenberg
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.



Great way to get more use out of your videos

Monday, April 20, 2009 by Brennan Knotts
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.



The Problem with Free Online Video Players (unless striptease schoolgirl is part of your brand)

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Brennan Knotts
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.

White House stops using YouTube for its online video

Tuesday, March 3, 2009 by Brennan Knotts
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)





Cantaloupe.tv sponsoring CloudCamp - Indianapolis

Monday, January 19, 2009 by Brennan Knotts

If you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you're hip to "cloud computing," and if you're not, well actually, you probably still are whether you know it or not.

If you've interacted with any application on the web (a daily, if not almost hourly occurrence for most people) then you've taken part in some form of cloud computing. Using gmail? That's cloud computing. Using wordpress or some other blogging application? Cloud computing. How about Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc.? You get the picture.

Cantaloupe is a big proponent of the cloud, seeing as how so much of what we do exists there including our video magazines and our to be released online video management system Backlight 2.0.

So it's only fitting that we should sponsor CloudCamp - Indianapolis, which is being hosted by one of our clients and services provider Bluelock.

Here's more information if you're interested in attending. Registration is free:

When: Wednesday, January 28th. 5-9:15pm.
Where: Bluelock, 325 Morenci Trail, Indianapolis, In 46268

Web Technology Trends and How Cantaloupe Measures up...

Thursday, July 24, 2008 by Vicki Duncan Gardner

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.

Being Perceived as Innovative

Friday, June 13, 2008 by Brennan Knotts
Being wired as I am to think analytically and systematically, to require proof and evidence, to be logical and rational in everything I do, I hesitate to ever advocate using a marketing tool simply because it's new and perceived as innovative. Nor would I say you should do something just for the sake of being different.

However, in my meetings with Cantaloupe clients this week, that was continually an unsolicited cited benefit of Cantaloupe's Video Magazines.

For one client, the Video Magazine was a point of differentiation that, with all other aspects being equal, helped them stand out from their competition. This client had observed that their competition had started using email as a marketing tool, they were doing direct mail pieces, advertising in local print publications, and hosting events. Doing the same thing as everybody else wasn't going to move the needle for their business. They told us directly that they turned to the Video Magazine because it was different and it made them look innovative.

Another client in the consulting space said nearly same thing without being prompted. She just said by using internet videos in their marketing they show their clients that they're on the cutting edge of innovation. Even though they don't do marketing consulting, the clients connect the innovation in their marketing, to innovation in the service they receive. Essentially, the web video strengthens their brand.

Brand marketing is perceived as difficult to measure and almost everyone I talk to about it usually tosses the measurement aside all together; however, I don't think there is any denying that anything that improves the perception of your brand has a positive effect on your business.

Considering the cost, is it a net positive? That's where the measurement is important...