Archive for the ‘Online Video’ Category

Online Video a Big Factor in Auto and Parts Sales for the Super Bowl

February 2nd, 2012

This is a guest post written by Alex Polonsky, car enthusiast and the developer of VidCompare.com

Traditional television advertising is still the dominant way to get your message across when trying to sell a car. Automotive manufactures are relentless in trying to capture as much air time as possible. The grand meccah of tv advertising would be during the Super Bowl, where manufactures give it their all to capture the attention of about 70 million viewers. While this sounds like a lot, their lasting impact might be low. The Super Bowl commercial only lasts about 30 seconds, and is usually only seen once or twice. Manufactures have now started to release their Super Bowl commercials a few weeks early online, to gain viral support. By hosting their commercials as online videos, they can reach an audience for weeks or months as opposed to just a day or two. Some commercials like this Volkswagen commercial has almost 50,000,000 views!

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2012 Online Video Predictions – OVPs

December 15th, 2011

In our third annual OVP Predictions piece we look back on the online video space from a general practitioner’s view (mine) and ahead from a leader’s view (the OVP founders, CEOs, VPs, etc.). It’s been another amazing year filled with record breaking events, ups and downs, foundings and shutterings (neither of which are words) and the addition of 10+ new OVPs. It’s a crowded space indeed, a theme you will see often in the words below. Over the years at VidCompare we’ve watched over 100 platforms ebb and flow with the threat of commoditization while roughly 15 OVPs were acquired or rolled-up into other OVPs, and 13 shut their doors. All this while video viewership continued at a breakneck pace. In September 2011 comscore reported that 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content for an average of 19.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in 39.8 billion video views (Wow).

We’ve seen several OVPs begin to specialize in an attempt to pull away from the pack with one OVP in particular making a unique move into the world of cloud-based application management (Brightcove), while Ooyala honed in on analytics and monetization, RealGravity into the world of advertising and syndication, Unicorn Media and Twistage sharpening their workflow management skills, and Magnify.net dominating the world of curated content.

Enough of the obvious, let’s move onto the interesting stuff. This year we’ve culled together an impressive list of predictions from 10 OVPs, and 2 OVP gurus. Continue on to get the inside scoop from those whom have been in the trenches since the early days and don’t forget to leave your comments.

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Learn To Be a Pro Video Marketer

October 13th, 2011

As an online marketer by profession I’ve come to know and appreciate MarketingProfs over the years with their deep and current marketing insights, so I was honored when asked to host a webinar for them in a series called Video Marketing Made Simple through their educational arm, MarketingProfs University. It’s an eleven course series with great topics and top-notch professionals offering years of experience and expertise along with some great course materials including:

  1. A free copy of the book How to Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck: Advice to Make Any Amateur Look Like a Pro by Steve Stockman (a $13.95 value)
  2. Access to the How-To Guide: A Quick Guide to YouTube and Creating Your Own YouTube Channel (a $49 value).
  3. Access to the MarketingProfs article 8 Ways to Create Enough Video Content to Last 18 Months.
  4. Access to the MarketingProfs online seminar: Creating Fresh B2B Video Content All Year Long (a $129 value).

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OVP VPFactory Masters the Art of Video Player Development

July 8th, 2011

Out of a small shop in Southern California is a start up Online Video Platform (OVP) born from a successful Romanian design firm. They’ve taken a path less traveled in the OV space creating a unique little niche for themselves focusing on fully customizable and elegant video players while offering all of the necessary OVP services for very little cash per month. Stemming from the design world VPFactory has spent almost two years fine tuning their Video Player as a Service (VPaaS) solution with a ridiculously easy to use backend that allows creative minds the freedom to fine tune every detail of the video player with unique WYSIWYG and drag-drop editors that even a technophobe can use.

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Be An Online Video VIP

April 20th, 2011

OnlineVideo.net is running an online video content contest for all of you video producers out there whom are creating original content that is creative and effective in reaching and informing users. The goal of the VIP (Video In Practice) contest is to reward companies who are harnessing the power on online video as part of their marketing strategy to promote and sell their products. I think this is a brilliant idea as I am both a huge proponent of online video and an online marketer so kudos to the StreamingMedia and OnlineVideo.net teams for coming up with the idea.

There are five categories that businesses can enter based on company size:

  • Small business –fewer than 100 employees
  • Large business- more than 100 employees
  • Local products and services
  • National products and services
  • Nonprofit/Government/Educational/Other organizations

The first round of selections will be narrowed by the general public, then a panel of professional judges will select one winner per category which will be announced on June 13. Submissions will be accepted through May 2, voting on May 9 – 23, and finalists announced (top 3 per category) on May 24.

They’ve already got some slick videos collected, check out these small business submissions, here. To enter your videos you can upload from your computer, submit a URL or post to a third party site like YouTube then email the description and company name to onlinevideo (at) onlinevideo.net.

Winners will receive some impressive (and expensive) software to help them further their video production endeavors including:

  • Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium ($1,699 value)
  • Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Pro ($299 value)
  • Sorenson Media Squeeze 7 ($799 value)
  • Telestream Wirecast 4.0 ($449 value)
  • Wowza Media Server ($995 value)

Get crackin people, this is a cool contest!