If you head to Bitly.tv, what you’re going to see is a 25-screengrab grid of what they claim are the hot viral videos right this second.  The page is extremely simple with virtually nothing but the screen grabs to look at.  And they’ve got some cool Javascript action going on when you start moving your mouse over the videos.

Now this is a seriously cool bit of technology, assuming it works as advertised.  Bit.ly is in a unique position of being able to see a huge number of shortened links come through their service.  The ability to translate that link behavior into a kind of trending-topics idea is really promising.

And it’s definitely high time that we had some metrics to measure real-time viral movement.  Between shortened links, Facebook, email marketing, YouTube, regular links, blogs, and all the countless other social tools… you’d think someone would sooner or later be able to start compiling that sharing data and start forming it into something coherent.

And that’s what Bitly.tv is all about.

I am a little concerned about the accuracy of their data.  For instance, The infamous “D*** In A Box” SNL skit with Justin Timberlake is currently on their home page.  That video is 2 years old, so it wouldn’t exactly fit the definition of going viral.  It’s possible that their data is currently just purely based on what’s being shared.  And that makes sense.  I would hope that over time they can begin to weed out older videos that are spiking due to seasonal or other circumstantial reasons.

But it is still very early.  Let’s give them some time to get the kinks out.

I also expect that they’re going to get compared to Alexa pretty quickly, I think, for the simple fact that their data is only coming from one source.  That one source, of course, is but a small fraction of how things go viral.  Viral analytics is something that’s going to take a while to figure out because the nature of how things are shared online is constantly in flux.

This is, however, a huge step in the right direction.  A gigantic number of links are shared via Bit.ly, and they should have some realistic ideas of what videos are “going viral.”  I look forward to using the service to help me discover viral trends I might otherwise have missed.  I’m already thinking of all sorts of great applications for this data.

Related posts:

1. Attributor and TubeMogul to Build Viral Video Metrics
2. Viral Video Round Up – Lessons From This Week’s Viral Successes -12/07/2009
3. Viral Video Round Up – Lessons From This Week’s Viral Successes – 10/30/2009
4. Viral Video Round Up – Lessons From This Week’s Viral Successes – 10/25/2009
5. Viral Video Round Up – Lessons From This Week’s Viral Successes – 12/12/2009

The social network of choice? Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

Advertising seems to be on the rise as 29% said they are increasing the total amount spent and pushing more towards online.

The Ad-ology report also showed that 20% of small business owners are optimistic about the economy and its recovery next year.

Other notes:

• 31% say they don’t use social media because their customers don’t use social media.
• More than one-third of these business owners plan to spend more time writing white papers and e-articles.
• 52% of small business owners surveyed plan to devote more resources to cause marketing in 2010.
• 42% plan to participate in trade shows or conferences, and the percentage of these planning to spend on trade publications increased 18% from last year.

It seems that of late a lot of pundits and business owners are sure the economy will get moving next year and start climbing out of its downward slide. But with the way things are progressing in D.C. can anyone be too sure? Bankers recently stiffed the President on a meeting, his policies are meeting with criticism and roadblocks at every turn (almost) and the people never seem to be happy. Unhappy people does not turn in to increased purchasing, does it? I guess it depends on getting jobs made and filled, getting products made and sold and getting steps taken to stimulate it all.

Source: Ad-ology Research – Small Business Marketing Forecast

Related posts:

1. How to Make Online Video Accessible to SMBs
2. Interview with Jivox’s Diaz Nesamoney – Online Video Advertising for SMBs
3. Spotmixer Interview with John Love – Online Video for SMBs
4. Local Search & Online Video – Why SMBs Need a Video Searchmercial
5. SMBs Fall in Love with Free, Custom Online Video

Fancast, launched as a competitor to Hulu, has long been offering free movies and television episodes online.  Fancast Xfinity takes things to a whole new level.  Comcast customers that are dual subscribers (meaning they subscribe to Comcast cable television as well as high speed Internet service) will soon be able to use the new service to stream episodes of their favorite shows from all sorts of channels, such as TLC, AMC (Mad Men!), TNT, TBS, and more.  Subscribers to regular Comcast cable service will simply need to log in at Fancast.com to be granted access.

The new content available to these customers will correspond directly to the tiered package they have for their home cable service.  That means, if you have a television package that contains HBO, then your login will grant you access to streaming HBO shows.  Sadly, the reverse is true.  If you don’t get HBO on your home tier (like me), then you won’t get that programming on Xfinity.

All of this new streaming content is free, as it should be, because you’ve already paid for it through your normal bill.  And the only limit to how much you’re allowed to stream is related to the standard Comcast limit of 250GB per month.

Now, it just so happens that I am a Comcast customer, and I subscribe to the dual service package for Internet and cable.  So I decided to check it out.  The early verdict is quite good.  The key difference here between this service and Hulu–which I love–is that Hulu mostly offers content from major networks (at least when it comes to television content).  Fancast Xfinity is almost kind of the opposite, focusing on cable network content that has not really been available like this online before, at least not for free.  (Don’t forget that Comcast sort of owns Hulu now after their purchase of a ton of NBC stock).

I can envision a scenario where I’m out of town on a business trip, maybe a conference or something, and I want to catch up on shows I’ve missed.  Maybe I didn’t get to see the latest episode of Entourage or this week’s Breaking Bad.  Now, without having to wait for reruns occurring naturally in the broadcast schedule, I can simply pop open the laptop, log-in at Fancast.com, and watch those shows.  It’s pretty sweet, actually.

In fact, it’s got me wondering about something:  Is it possible that the DVR is going to die soon?  D0n’t get me wrong, I love my DVR, and would consider doing bodily harm to anyone that tried to remove it from my home.  But this explosion of television on the web, from Hulu to Fancast to Amazon and iTunes… it’s changing things, isn’t it?  We’re rapidly approaching a time when I simply won’t have a need to “record” shows anymore, because they’ll be available to me in such a huge variety of ways.  Of course, that’s probably a long way off.  There’s still quite a bit of gap between the experience of watching television on your laptop and watching it on your giant flat-screen with surround sound.  But as technology improves and prices drop, that gap will shrink, and I’ll be curious to see what becomes of the DVR in the coming years.

If you’re a Comcast customer, head over to Fancast.com and log in using the email address that was created when you first got your services installed at home, and check it out.  I’d love to know what you think.  In the meantime, I’m going to go catch up on Mad Men.

Related posts:

1. Comcast Says Hulu Ads Confuse Women, Aims to Target Demographic
2. blinkx Adds Online Video Content from People.com
3. US Consumers Prefer Streaming Video Content vs. Downloading – Reports a New Study
4. Television ads to Video SEO – the Comcast-Mixpo partnership
5. Canadians Want More Access to TV Content Online

What is “open source”?

According to the Open Source Initiative, open source means more than access to the source code. Open-source also means that it’s “free” – that is, at no monetary cost to the user. That doesn’t mean that open source can’t be commercial. In fact, many open source software providers make their money by building up a large number of users on the free program, and then charging for the infrastructure and support around it to whoever needs it.

Contrast that with the some of the major providers in the online video platform (OVP) space, and their proprietary solutions; which require you to be a paid user with a high enough account status before you can gain access to their application programming interface (API), itself typically highly secured by the service provider to prevents unauthorized access to that API by non-account holders.

Besides free source code access, “open source” means other things as well.  Our founder Mark Robertson gave me his opinion of open source:

Open source can provide for several advantages which are realized when a significant user base collaborates to provide ongoing enhancements and support to the community of users.  In addition to potential cost benefits, there are advantages in terms of reliability, scalability, stability, flexibility and control.  That being said, a successful open source project does require a large and dedicated community of users and in most cases, those companies which adopt open source environments will require resource expertise in the set-up, integration and ongoing management.

About Kaltura – The Open-Source Video Platform Alternative

For a mini-brief on the company – Kaltura has positioned themselves in the industry as the “first and only open source video solution stack.” Kaltura’s claim is that their open-source approach is already bringing out a groundswell of innovation that makes high-end video solutions much more accessible to a larger number of publishers, who otherwise wouldn’t have the tools and resources available to do them. (Kaltura also appears to have a very robust community website with free tools, forums, and educational webinars to prop up their program.)

“We want to democratize the whole media space, tear down the walled gardens, and provide something that everybody can use – that’s affordable, that’s easy, that’s flexible.” Says Ron.

Ron also says that they boast the most rapid innovation rate over any other OVP – with over 1,000 developers in what he refers to as the “Kaltura Community,” building heaps of applications for everyone else. “It’s the most amount of flexibility in an OVP without a vendor lock-in for users.” Says Ron.

Kaltura advertises on their website that they have 43,600 publishers worldwide. It’s unclear however, how much of that number is made up of actual paying customers vs. free users. That being said, Kaltura does boast some mentionable client names, including Coca-Cola and Wikipedia. Also, they have been rated a “strong performer” in the OVP space by Forrester Wave research.

With the platform being free, Kaltura makes their money off their advertised value-added services to their platform users. These include custom design and development work, transcoding, hosting and streaming, content syndication, ad serving, aggregation of other 3^rd party services, maintenance and support packages, stats, and yes – Video SEO.

Potential Challenges with Kaltura’s Open-Source Program

Kaltura says they want to “democratize” the online video space with their open-source video solution. Yet a successful democracy also requires a large enough population to participate. Can an open-source video program really be a solution for everyone? Or for that matter, a notably sizeable and sustainable community? (Let’s say, “Kalturians?”) Here’s my take :

• Simple version has its limits. Kaltura does have many modules and plug-ins that are less difficult to implement and will work with tools like Wordpress and Drupal. However, what you get is a limited module of their OVP. If you want the full OVP on your own server, it will require some work.
• Programmers needed. If you want to implement the full thing – the Kaltura “CE System,” it’s going to require having someone that is well versed in LAMP (Linux, Apache 2.2, MySQL 5 and PHP 5.2.2+) – so a developer can take Kaltura’s source code and integrate it.
• More IT resources needed? The full program will also require having a server/CDN that can support it and, most importantly – someone (a developer) to maintain, troubleshoot, upgrade, etcetera.

The Verdict

Can Kaltura’s open-source OVP really do everything that a closed-source provider can do? Unfortunately that’s not in my realm of knowledge to answer. Can it do some things better than a closed-source can? You’ll likely get differing opinions from developers on that one. Does it really have an “easy” solution that makes it accessible to a larger audience of video publishers? Yes, but I would say it appears to be heavily towards one type of audience – those with IT resources available. It would be interesting to find out if anybody without programming experience could actually build an successful video experience using just limited version of the Kaltura video program… and say it was “easy.”

But if that is the case, then I’m sure someone amongst the 43,600 publishers in the Kaltura community will let me know that real soon.

So is this really a free solution? Maybe, if you have people who are willing to work for Cheetos.  But again, there is really no such thing as a “free” solution.  As Mark knows all to well, even this wordpress blog requires support.  As he put it, “free is not necessarily the point, flexibility and scalability are.  Even with an open source platform like wordpress, there are plenty of companies that provide hosting and management of wordpress blogs because not everyone has the time or resources to do it in house.”  Hence, Kaltura also provides paid services to for those that need that expertise.

As for whether to choose and open source video platform or a proprietary one, it all boils back down to your overall requirements and resources.  Only you can make the decision of what is more valuable to you, but we certainly think that it is worth considering all available options.

Thank you Ron for taking the time to talk with us at ReelSEO, and thanks for the shout out at the end of the video.

Related posts:

1. Kaltura Launches Free Open Source Online Video Platform
2. AlwaysOn Selects Open Source Video Platform Solution from Kaltura
3. Mozilla Grants $100K to Develop Open Source Online Video Platform
4. Open Source Video Module for Drupal – New from Kaltura
5. JW Player & Long Tail Video Platform Overview – The #1 Open Source Video Player

The Secrets of Effective Sales Videos

So, how do you do it? How do you ensure the videos you add to your site will indeed be effective and help drive sales?

The truth is, as with all marketing tools, there’s no one sure fire method that is guaranteed to always work, but there are quite a few techniques that seem to work fairly well:

1.  Here’s a quick way to decide where to begin – Apply the Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle, also known as the “80-20 Rule”, applies to most businesses. Simply put it means that you’re probably making much of your revenue with a well defined group of top selling items. You’ll probably get the most from your video endeavor by boosting these items’ product pages with videos first. Most online retailers have over five hundred items in their catalog. Choosing to follow the Pareto Principle serves as an excellent guideline for where to begin with video enhancements.

2.  You don’t need long videos to increase sales – Keep them sweet and short

The truth is that online your audience has a very shot attention span to start of with. This issue is compacted by the less-than-ideal objective qualities of most online video: download times, small player windows, poor sound quality, etc. The good news is that this is actually in your favor because it allows you to save on production time and costs. Ideally you should keep your product videos to less than one minute long. If your product is especially complex or pricey you might want to extend that by up to 50% however there’s little point in going above 90 seconds. The simple fact is the vast majority of your viewers will simply ignore anything longer…

3.  If you don’t conduct A/B tests from the start you’ll regret it later

Quite obviously different types of videos perform better for different types of products and different types of clients. The catch is we can’t know which type of video preforms best for our products and client base until we’ve tested a few versions – failing to test for effect early on can mean leaving substantial conversion potentials untapped. The simplest way to do this is by creating and uploading a few versions of product videos for a limited group in your catalog and monitoring their performance, in terms of conversion rates and purchasing behaviors, in order to determine which gave the best results. Once you feel you’ve accumulated the data you need, pick the best formats and them for the rest of your site’s products.

4.  What everybody should know about captions

Captions within your videos have a surprising effect on click through rates and conversions.  Check out these two product videos. Although the only difference between both versions is the red captions in the version on the right, there is a 8.3% difference in their conversion rates. That’s right – merely adding captions to the original video improved its conversions by over 8 percent.

5.  Add user reviews to increase trust

User reviews and testimonials are popular in e-commerce because people tend to trust ratings and recommendations from their peers. You can increase the ROI from any existing user’s reviews you have by adding them to your videos, as shown in this example from England’s leading online Golf’s retail site (click the “View Video Showreel” beneath the product images).

6.  Include video in your on-site search results to increase sales

Research shows people searching your site are twice to three times more likely to make a purchase than those merely browsing. The reason this is so is because searching visitors usually have a clear intent, while browsers are more likely to be casual traffic. A good way to use video to capitalize on the quality traffic using your site’s search engine is by indicating the availability of video within every item’s search results. Indicating an item has video increases the likelihood a user will click to view it, and then buy it.

7.  Are you getting the most out of your videos?

Once you’ve invested in creating a few videos you can maximize the ROI on them by including them in all your online marketing activities. Link to them from your email marketing campaigns, upload them to your social media profiles and use them to push your SEO campaigns via proper tagging and deep backlinks.

Make video your holiday resolution and beat the competition

Adding video to your site can not only help improve your sales, it can also be a fun experience for both you and your customers. With the holidays right around the corner, now is the perfect time to add a few select videos to help drive your holiday-season’s promotions. Online video can steer traffic away from your competitors, improve your site’s stickiness AND give you a powerful way to capture more sales during these holidays.

About our Guest Author – Tal Rubenczyk:

Tal is the CEO of Treepodia. Prior to establishing Treepodia, Tal was the co-founder of Celebros, where he headed the marketing division for more than seven years. Tal brings his e-commerce knowledge, international marketing experience and networking connections to Treepodia.

Treepodia is a leading video platform provider for online retailers, enabling them to cover their entire product catalog with effective and engaging video content in just 24 hours.  They also have a “risk-free” model where you only pay for views that generate new revenue.

Related posts:

1. Hosted Video SEO – Tips for Website Video Search Engine Optimization
2. Ecommerce Video Will Take Off in 2009 – New Report Shows that Product Videos Work!
3. Video SEO Tips from Aaron Wall of SEOBook
4. Video Agencies’ Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
5. Youtube Content ID – Major Media Companies to Sell Video Ads

By outlining the basic steps from idea to implementation, the whitepaper takes retailers and e-commerce companies through the entire process of creating and deploying online videos that compel shoppers to buy (I mean, that is the purpose, right.)

Some retailers view video as an entertainment medium.  Others see it as a social media tool.  While e-commerce video may both entertain and provide a valuable service for customers, within the context of e-commerce, video needs to be thought of primarily as a sales tool.  If you do not believe the primary purpose of video in e-commerce is to sell more products, this whitepaper is not written for you.

Citing long-standing and widely accepted research, the whitepaper demonstrates how to approach the entire topic and find the beginning point. From there it gives information on how to turn video viewers into buyers.

If you or your firm are getting into online video or thinking about it, then read this in its entirety.  It will help you design your project and as well as help you avoid common pitfalls and make the most out of your budget.  It also provides real world examples of successful e-commerce video implementations and shows you some commonly used software and the basics of video production and editing.  It’s a long read, but a good one.  You can also download a copy of the whitepaper here.

In case you missed it – Here was our video with Justin:

Click here to watch the video.

The Video Commerce Consortium the largest trade group for e-commerce professionals, online marketers and technologies and is devoted to advancing the use of video in e-commerce. You can register to join for free here.

Thanks Justin for the in-depth whitepaper.

Related posts:

1. 3 Principles for Creating E-Commerce Video that Sells
2. Creating Persuasive Interactive Video for E-Commerce
3. Creating Videos for Business on a Shoestring Budget
4. LiveClicker Video Commerce Summit June 1-2
5. Video + SEO = Best Practices for Video & E-Commerce

Is this a big deal? As a certain online video leader told Mark,

“It [AWS] makes RTMP streaming available to the masses. All other CDN’s are nice if you are a big company with people that can negotiate prices, but AWS is the only one you can instantly sign up for and get started. They’re extremely cheap for low volumes too. The other CDN’s won’t talk to you if you stream less than 10GB/month.”

With Amazon Cloudfront’s announcement that they are ready to host your streaming content, you don’t need to talk to anyone. This is seriously going to force the industry to adapt. If their prices are comparable or better than the current CDN offerings it’s going to be a massive shift in power and Amazon could end up accidentally taking out one or two.

But that’s none of our concern, business is about adapting and overcoming and we, as publishers of content that needs to be streamed to the masses, will do just that and so should the rest. The Amazon Cloudfront servers are running Adobe’s Flash Media Server 3.5.2 (FMS) which means you can use standard Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) protocol, or its encrypted version, RTMPE. It also means potential for dynamic bit rate streaming so that no matter what kind of connection the end-user is on, the video will stream as well as it can.

Recently, Gamers Daily News had its YouTube Channel shut down for copyright infringement. It seems that even though we are directly sent game videos, we are not to distribute them. I know, it sounds completely asinine to me as well. But perhaps that, combined with this, was the kick in the pants we needed to find our own solution and start generating some revenue off of our video streaming.

How’s it work?

Amazon Cloudfront organizes your content into distributions with unique Cloudfront.net domain names. You can even map your own domain to one if you like. The files you store there can them be accessed via standard HTTP or RTMP. You can even host files in multiple locations and then serve them based on GEO-IP (pretty sure you’d need to do that coding yourself though).  It all sounds so easy but is it?

Here’s what they say you need to do to get started:

• Store the original versions of your files in an Amazon S3 bucket.
• Create a distribution to register that bucket with Amazon CloudFront through a simple API call.
• Use your distribution’s domain name in your web pages, media player, or application. When end users request an object using this domain name, they are automatically routed to the nearest edge location for high performance delivery of your content.
• Pay only for the data transfer and requests that you actually use.

So I went to test it out. First off, you can use your Amazon Affiliate login to start using AWS (awesome!) I’m hoping as I write this that I can also use my Amazon Affiliate revenue to pay for the services, on the next page I found out that you cannot though if you have an Amazon.com Visa you can use that along with all the standard credit cards (No Paypal or other electronic payment options available, a pity). It seems they pinged my credit card for a $2 charge when I signed up, I’m not certain, but I see a $2 hold placed today and the only thing I have done is sign up for Cloudfront.

Now they say you only pay for the data in and out for Cloudfront, but you also have to pay for storage via the Amazon Simple Storage service. That’s 15 US cents a Gigabyte for the first 50 Terabytes. Oh and that’s monthly so if you have a lot of content it could ramp up quickly. 100GB would be $15/month just in storage fees. That seems like a total scam to me considering storage space should be a one-time purchase in my book. But if you need content to be available as fast as possible in both Europe and America (where Amazon offers storage), this is a good option as there are three locations – US Standard (Virginia most likely), US Northern California and EU Ireland.

In the example above I mentioned 100GB of content, that would be $15/month in storage. But the whole point is to stream that data to the masses (as we are here to talk about video streaming). So if you have 1000 viewers for your content per month that turns into 100,000 GB a month (100GB time 1000 views). This falls into the first 10TB tier of streaming service and so in the US and EU it would be 17 US Cents per GB or $17,000! Slightly more if you use a Hong Kong or Japan Edge location.

Alright so maybe 100GB with 1000 viewers each is excessive, or highly optimistic. So let’s do the math for 100GB. 100GB of transfer would be $17 a month (150 would be $25.50) We’ll say 150GB of storage as well which is $22.50 so that totals up to $39.50 a month.

Remember what was said about sub 10GB (“The other CDN’s won’t talk to you if you stream less than 10GB/month”)? Well 10GB of storage is $1.50 a month and 10GB of streaming at Amazon is another $1.70 for a total of $3.20 per month.

Amazon certainly is taking their global network and turning it to profit in new ways. I can see Google looking at it with watering mouth and thinking ‘hey do we have enough spare resources to do this as well?’ Then it would be a fight of gigantic proportions for your data storage and streaming and with Google, you’d already have built-in ad-serving. Oops, sorry Amazon, didn’t mean to give Google any ideas…or did I? But I digress. Back to the topic at hand.

Is Amazon Cloudfront worth the cost?

It would sure seem like it. For those of you who aren’t transferring 10GB a month the cost would be minimal. It could certainly speed up the delivery of that streaming video for your users in the US and EU and it would give you a stable environment where all you really need to do is upload, link and just pay for what you use.

Some Additional Technical Notes About Amazon Web Services and Amazon S3

The AWS Management Console, which is still in beta, sucks. Not in an organizational way, but in a not very user friendly way. Several times while writing this article scripts had to be stopped, the browser had to be full-screened so I could close a popup and generally it’s slow. If you’re like me and travel and work on a lower-powered or smaller laptop (like a netbook) then you’ll find these issues annoying you as well.

Also, for each service they offer, you have to activate it. So in my case I used my affiliate account to login and activate Cloudfront, but before I could set anything up I had to then go activate a Simple Storage Service (S3) account so I could then create a distribution and link it to a bucket (where you store your stuff in S3). They say I already had access to it (from the Cloudfront activation no doubt) but the pages also could not seem to remember that I was logged in and clicking on many of them would take you to a page that said “login” or even “Create an AWS account.” Clicking on these links did not require you to login or signup again but it certainly is not something that should be happening. From many pages there is no link back to the dashboard so it’s a pain in the ass from a navigation standpoint.

For some reason, unknown to me at the time, I could not get a distribution to be created. I thought perhaps it was a Firefox problem and checked in IE8. What I realized was that for some reason the list of distributions was minimized and only a window showing “0 Distributions” was shown. I had to pull down on a separator bar to see the list of distributions. Most likely another minor annoyance because of the resolution of the netbook.

This might make you laugh, but I could not figure out how to get files up to the S3 bucket. So I had to go read the documentation. Turns out it was no surprise that I could not find it as you have to do actual coding to get the files up there. Well actually, you just have to go search for some tools. I found S3Fox Organizer which is a Firefox add-on that helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3. It is easy to install and use as it is integrated into the browser. so BONUS!

For a second there I thought I was going to have to get my coding hat on to put a file up there which would have been a deal breaker for many of you out there. There are various other tools that are available for PC, Mac and Linux. I found some resources for you:

• Backup to S3 – Some tools listed here http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html
• Clients for PC, Mac and Linux – http://www.labnol.org/internet/amazon-s3-clients-roundup/8286/
• S3Tools – http://s3tools.org/s3tools S3tools project offers several Open source tools for accessing Amazon S3 – Simple Storage Service.

Whew, this turned into a massive article. Sorry about that. But I hope you found it interesting or helpful or both.

Related posts:

1. Streaming Media Market to Grow 135% Over 5 Years
2. Comcast Adds Even More Streaming Content Online For Subscribers
3. Robust Live Streaming Video Platform for Professionals – Mogulus Pro
4. Streaming Media West & Online Video Platform Summit Podcast Coverage!
5. New Service Measures Speed & Quality of Streaming Online Video

In this post, I will explain how each of these 5 P’s is essential to virtually any professional online video project.

Overview of the 5 P’s – The Sesame Street Rule

Recently when I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference in downtown Chicago, I was getting ready to do an on-camera interview with Web Marketing Today’s Dr. Ralph Wilson.  (You can watch my previous interview with Dr. Wilson done back in February.)  He explained to me that much of his audience were relative newbies to online video marketing, and so what he needed from me was to share a tip or two that most anyone could digest.

That’s when it hit me: If you want an easy way for people to remember a complex subject like online video, do what I call the “Sesame Street Rule” – include a single number and letter in your presentation. Right on the spot with just minutes to my air time, I put together this list of 5 P’s of what to remember if you’re doing, or considering doing, professional-quality online video. (And by “professional”, we can either be talking about video for a business use, an actual objective you want to accomplish; or a clear educational, informational or promotional benefit for someone other than just yourself.)

1. Plan
2. Practice
3. Publish
4. Promote
5. Perform

I came up with these 5 P’s from my own years of professional experience in online video project management for my own business and clients, so I can testify that each one of these P’s will be essential for your own professional needs.

Here are some tips I’ve gathered for each of them:

1: Plan

Too often I find that people start a video project without clearly defining what they’re trying to accomplish. This is especially disastrous if you’re working with others on your video project, and you haven’t communicated every aspect of your project in advance. Here are some questions to be asking yourself – and have answers ready to share with others in your project – before you start shooting anything:

• What are your goals?
• Who is your audience?
• What is your theme?
• What topics will you cover?
• What equipment are you going to use?
• Who will be performing?
• Where will you be shooting?
• How many shows?
• How often will they appear?
• How long will they be?
• Where will you be found?
• What do you expect your audience to do?
• What is your budget?
• When do you need to get the freakin’ thing done?

These are all things that, given the chance, should be written or typed out before you actually start doing any show with anyone. For my own interview on Web Marketing Today, in just 5 minutes I wrote out my theme for what I was going to share on camera, and my key talking points.

Planning also involves having a backup plan. At the SES Chicago conference, I always bring with me my own portable camcorder, just in case there’s an opportunity for any good footage and interviews; and also in case my videographer doesn’t show up or has problems of their own. I’ve even done segments using a regular webcam, which was better than nothing and sometimes our audience couldn’t really tell much of a difference. Better planning means better content, and better content with even barely adequate video equipment is still better than having great equipment and not planning your content well.

2: Practice

I’ve watched a lot of people who haven’t had much experience on camera try to do a shoot, and continually flub, and then see them get frustrated and want to give up. I find it’s what stops so many people from getting into online video because they’ve already psyched themselves out. They feel scared that they’ll do a terrible job, and have convinced themselves that everyone will see what a terrible job they did when its online; and then they’ve lost control of what they were trying to accomplish.

Yet for anyone that’s new to online video, be they behind the camera or in front of it, learning requires a certain amount of trial and error. By practicing and reviewing what you do, you learn from your mistakes and can correct them before publishing anything. Online video doesn’t have to be intimidating when you realize that you have all the control to make things right, when you allow yourself to practice. The more you practice doing online video, the better you’ll get.

Here are some things to practice when you’re rehearsing on camera (or coaching someone else who is):

• Pace yourself. See if you speak to fast or too slow at certain points, or throughout the entire piece. Make sure to allow yourself to pause for emphasis, or just to catch your breadth. Don’t make it a race to cram a bunch of information in the shortest amount of time, or have uncomfortably long pauses that break the tempo. Its much more important to speak at an even pace with less information, than having more information that people are going to be less likely to remember any of it because they couldn’t keep up with you.

• Enunciate. Are all of your words clear to understand? If you can’t tell, your audience certainly won’t be able to. Allow yourself to slow down just a bit when enunciating those hard-to-understand words.

• Emphasize. Are you making the right emphasis on key words or phrases that are the high points of your message? Sometimes these are the places you can slightly raise your voice, or even have a slight pause with an important keyword or point you’re making.

• Eye contact. Are you remembering to maintain eye contact with the camera on you? You want to look directly into the camera often enough to connect with your viewers, but not so much that they feel they’re in a staring contest with you.

• Control your body language. Are you appearing stiff, or moving your hands and body around so much that it’s distracting to viewers? Its not just what’s coming out of your mouth that’s giving the performance – the rest of the body serves like a symphony conductor. Learn to use your hands or parts of your body in controlled manners that relate to the strength of the point (or a key word) that you’re making.

• Length. This is my own biggest problem – talking too long! (Yes, my editor knows that all too well.) Remember that for online video, the shorter piece is often the more effective one. Don’t think that it takes a long video to impress people and show them how smart you think are or how good you think look – more likely they’ll think you’re long-winded. Shortening the message has more impact, makes your message and performance easier to remember and absorb, and makes your audience feel smarter about it.

Do you need a script? Not at all. Remember online video is largely about storytelling and appearing to be having a real conversation with your audience. You need to come across as natural, not sales-y.

But what if you need help remembering any talking points? Then you can have them in front of you and just practice talking off-the-cuff. If you find that you still need your monologue or dialogue fleshed out, then do this: Write out a description for each point, but nothing too much that you can’t memorize in front of a camera. Otherwise you’ll find yourself looking down or away from the camera and at your notes, which never looks good. (OK, you can have carefully positioned cue cards by the camera if you really still need help, but again – just easy sentences you can remember and expand on – NO SCRIPT!)

Screw you, Grant – I want to read from a script. OK then, fine… If you really feel like you want to practice reading a script, then go ahead – but keep the language “loose” and not feel like you have to read it aloud, word-for-word. Allow yourself to go with what the moment compels you to say. That’s even true if you’re just doing a 30-second spot.

But I’m an experienced speaker, I don’t need to practice to be on camera! WRONG. I’ve shot experienced salespeople who certainly could talk great… when a camera wasn’t on them. But when they were aware of a camera being on them, they often would insist that they had to read from their cue cards, which then they would completely flub up and be prone to swearing fits. Here’s what I find works for those who’ve been set too much in their old ways: I tell them to do a couple of practice runs without the camera while they read from their script, so they feel like there’s no pressure in rehearsing. Then after I do a few on-camera takes with their script, I have them do a few takes without any script – even riff – and then compare that with they rehearsed. I may even just engage them in a conversation and leave the camera rolling, and often that can be the best take!

Time to be your own critic. After you have made your practice clips – watch yourself, and have others watch you. This is where you need to allow yourself and others to be honest critics of your work. Find people in your immediate business circle or social circle watch your video and ask them to comment on it. When you gather their feedback, its all staring in you in the face of what you’ve learned from your “control” audience, you’ll have an opportunity to make adjustments before you have it ready for the “full” audience. (For my own video projects, I find Wistia to be very good for showcasing video to people and gathering their comments, and even using a video heat map with larger test audiences.)

Practice the live shoot. I also find that practicing your performance of recorded online video also better prepares you for any live video shoots you may have to do. When I’m at conferences, I sometimes find myself put right on the spot to either give an interview on camera or think of some questions at the top of my head. What I find works for me is this: Before the cameras start rolling, do several test runs in your head – actually visualize what you’re going to say and visualize what the picture will look like on camera. That way you’re “virtually practicing” in your head. (Which probably explains why I talk to myself too much – something both my editor and my girlfriend comment about

3: Publish

Online video marketing tends to work much better when you to put out regular videos with some consistency. I usually recommend producing a bunch of shows in a single shoot period, and publishing them individually per a consistent time interval. That way you allow time for an audience to build and anticipate what’s going to come next, and thus stay tuned to your video channel. Here are some professional online video publishing tips to follow:

• Do “hosted” online video publishing. Self-hosting the videos on your website or blog – i.e., having them embedded right on your branded site’s web page and play within the page ­– keeps people around your brand much better than on a shared video site like YouTube, and can be much more effective with achieving business goals. If you have a lot of videos to manage, seriously consider using an online video platform solution. (ReelSEO has a ton of reviews on many online video platforms available for businesses with all scopes and budgets.) Also remember to do a Google video sitemap, so you can have Google index your videos into its blended, or “universal” search results. (Doesn’t anybody just say “web search results” anymore??)

• Do “distributed” online video publishing. If you need to reach a large audience and want to increase your likelihood of having your video appear in search results, then publish your video to key video sharing sites – and not just YouTube. There are special video sites that carry some professional-quality features that you might find work better for you than YouTube, such as Blip.TV or Vimeo. There are also themed video sites, like how-to videos or professional/industry tips (such as eHow.com and wonderhowto.com, just to name a couple).  Make sure to place your videos in the proper categories your video would fall under so your video will be more findable. TubeMogul is a good  great resource for batching your submissions to multiple video sharing sites.

I’ll be a pest and say it again: When it comes to publishing, I can’t stress this enough – consistency is key! Successful professional online video is not about doing one-and-out – it’s about regularity. That’s how you build and maintain (and further build) an audience.

4: Promote

Here are some general steps to having your video found in the search engines, distributed by others, and generating targeted traffic and “buzz” for yourself.

• Make your videos “sharing-friendly.” Make sure the video player allows people to share the video, link to the video, email the video to others, and take a snippet of code that they can copy-paste and play on their own site if they want to.

• Do Video Search Optimization. Optimize the page content your videos are on. For YouTube, this would be the title, description, and “tags”, and a hyperlink inside the description, and other related videos in playlists you can set up in your YouTube channel. For your website, this includes building a video library and a website category just for videos, where you have keyword rich-copy around your video, title tags, meta descriptions, regular tags, header tags, and cross-linking on the page to other videos.

• Encourage audience participation. Mention your videos on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and in Twitter. You also want to encourage your audience to comment on your videos and dialogue with you on them. This is why blogs such as WordPress are an excellent means for both publishing and promoting your videos on your own site. Comment on other blogs or social networking forums on topics or discussions that relate to your own (relevant) video, and include a URL to the video on your own site.

• Do news releases. I also recommend sending out a news release on one of the online PR Services. PRWeb.com is just one of them where you can actually embed your video right in the news release, which gets picked up almost immediately in the search engines.

• Send out Email – If you have an opt-in email database and email marketing program, let people on your subscription list learn about what videos you have recently launched. Some email programs claim to allow for embedded video that doesn’t get caught up in spam filters, but I still recommend just including a graphic image of your video and a link people can click to watch on it on your own site.

• Let people subscribe to your videos. Blogs are based on RSS feeds that people can subscribe to when you have updates. Media RSS feeds (MRSS) are specifically suited for subscribing to feeds of online video. Make sure to create an MRSS feed specifically just for your video content.

5: Perform

You’re not done yet! You still need to measure what’s working and what isn’t, so you know what you can be doing more of.

Check out your Web analytics – when it comes to free tools, Google Analytics does have some basic features. In YouTube’s Insight feature, you can find out the level of interest in any of your videos during their duration, such has when people drop off, and when people become more interested, while the video is playing. There are also specialty web analytics that can give you charts of data on the durations of a video that people watch on average, where they come from and what they’re doing before they play the video, and what they do afterwords.

But the best metrics is actual feedback! Unless you’re only goal with video is to reach the largest audience possible, I find that measuring levels of audience engagement for a video can be a much better performance metric than the amount of traffic to it. Performance metrics for professional online video speaks much more about what do people do while the video is watched and after its been watched, instead of just the initial click on the video to watch it.

To help with measuring your video’s performance towards your professional objectives, I recommend including a clear call-to-action for your audience (i.e., what you want your audience to do next) either on the page of the video or the video itself.

The 5 P’s – simple, easy to remember and follow

There’s so much more on the 5 P’s than even what a single article (albeit a loooonnnng one) can provide. But remember we’re talking about what to always keep in your noggin’ when talking about, and doing, professional online video. When you can make a highly complex subject like professional online video easy for any audience (especially newbies) easy enough to follow, it will make your job a lot easier working with them, and make you own videos a lot better.

And should you still need some extra help remembering your 5 P’s with professional online video, watch these videos below… which I admit serve have nothing whatsoever to actually do with professional video, but can at least entertain you with the subject material and perhaps leave you slightly traumatized

Click here to watch the video.

Click here to watch the video.

Related posts:

1. Tips for Creating a Successful Online Video Foundation
2. 7 Tips for Successful Viral Video Production & Distribution
3. Choosing A Professional Online Video Content Platform
4. New Marketplace for Professional Online Videographers & Filmmakers
5. Miro – Open Source Video Projects – Participatory Culture Foundation

As part of their ongoing attempt to be profitable, the video portal has apparently been in talks for a while with movie studios to allow for movie rentals through YouTube.  A paid subscription model is a logical next step. David Eun, Google’s Vice President of Content Partnerships (how’s that for a title?), says that there’s a lot of content out there that YouTube isn’t able to access under their current model, such as full-length television episodes and movies.

Eun says they’re considering a variety of subscription models, including one that would work like current cable television does (pay a monthly fee and get access to a large amount of content for that month) as well as another that is more in line with how iTunes works (pay per content piece).

One of the battles they face in a move like this is that Hollywood studios are notoriously protective of their revenue streams–remember the recent lawsuit involving Redbox?  So bargaining with them for the right to show movies on YouTube might not be a simple conversation.  But there’s precedent, obviously, in the form of Amazon and iTunes rentals.

Of course, they’ll also have to be careful about how they pitch this to users.  YouTube rose to prominence, in part, because it is free.  And YouTube as you know it will continue to be free.  However, the masses have a tendency to freak out when they hear the word subscription being associated with something they’re used to getting for free.

So the question for you is this:  would you be willing to pay a YouTube subscription fee for new content like movies or tv episodes?  If so, how much would you be willing to plunk down.

The real tightrope here for YouTube is Hulu.  Hulu (and to a certain extent, FanCast) already offers full television episodes and movies… for free.  And it’s backed by a lot of major content producers like Fox and NBC.  So, what motivation does NBC have to make content available to YouTube when they could just put it on Hulu and keep the viewers local?  Let’s not forget that Hulu and YouTube are pretty much competitors on many fronts.  YouTube still gets far more visitors, and there’s that whole “user-created content” difference.  But essentially, a deal like this would only make YouTube and Hulu more direct competitors for the same audience.  I’m not sure how eager Hulu’s backers will be to see that happen.

It’s still far too early to speculate too much.  All that’s known, really, is that YouTube is dipping a toe in the subscription-model sea.  It’s yet another step that shows they’re constantly reevaluating what they need to do to get and stay profitable.

Related posts:

1. MySpace + Hulu = YouTube Rival?
2. Google Launches TV Ads Online Beta – Youtube Shows
3. The YouTube Reel Deel (Clearing some of the air around YouTube)
4. More Speculating On Google’s Profitability Plans For YouTube
5. Univision/YouTube Partnership Is A Bigger Deal Than You Think

Vzaar.com

So I was asked to give you my thoughts on the service. Oddly, given my rude and ofttimes total harshing of the mellows of other services I was a bit shocked. I mean seriously, if you have an advertiser and you want to have an overview of their service, do you go to the guy with the acid tongue and a hefty consumer-rights lean? I believe the answer to that is ‘only if you want to show the overview isn’t biased.’ What you all may not know is that I’ve done some other overviews for places that simply never materialized here. Not because Mark is an ego-maniacal censor but because there were no redeeming qualities of said services, so why give them some free press, right?

Now why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to believe what I have to say about Vzaar (you can ask Mark about the rest). I want you to know that I pull no punches and speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth (the way I see it anyway). That means no preferential treatment for advertisers or whatever. Plus, really, who else can get away with telling you all this crap and not get fired right? See how cool my job is at times?!

Alright, enough with the preamble bull and on to Vzaar.

What exactly is Vzaar?

In March 2007 a group of people decided to build an online platform to help eBay sellers supercharge their business’s with video. That service (it’s Vzaar, follow along!) went live September the 4th of that same year. Eventually, due to user demand, the service was expanded to allow the videos to be used just about everywhere.

Vzaar 2.0 is now where the service stands and is used by eCommerce merchants running their own web stores, web app developers showing screen casts and support videos to churches and their weekly sermons. So that’s what it is, now let’s look at the details:

Price:

Vzaar offers 5 packages ranging from $15/5GB to $300/300GB of playback a month. OK, they have a free version with 1GB so you can test it out as well. Is it a good deal? Well $300 for 300GB is pretty hefty and a quick check of the GDN webhost showed me that I could have my own dedicated server with 1500GB of bandwidth for half the price. Now I don’t even like them all that much so I won’t tell you what webhost it is. I was just giving you that so you could compare prices.

What it Offers:

The three lowest packages offer a limit of 1GB per file while the upper ones limit it at 2GB, but none have limits on number of videos. How much viewing are those playback bandwidths? Well, this is from the Vzaar website:

Again, big prices, but then Brightcove is $499 a month for 250GB and a 500 video limit. So where is the value? Well with all but the free account you get an unbranded, customizable, embeddable video player. You can play SD or HD and even stream to iPhones (Woot!). With the paid accounts you can mass upload to ebay, get a search enhancer (more later), autoplay (Boo! I hate that) and get privacy controls (who can see your videos on Vzaar).

The Service:

Alright, it’s time for the make or break portion of the show. Just after a word from our sponsor, oh wait, I haven’t got a sponsor.

How easy is it to get a video ready?

1. Login to your Vzaar account
2. Click Upload Video (non-strategically placed in the upper right corner).
3. Add a title, browse to video, click Upload
4. Choose Player size (they actually tell you the sizes if you click the show the different video sizes button which was cool). It will decide 4:3 or 16:9 for you.
5. Wait…while video uploads. Personally, I played the first ever Voltron game on my iPhone which I just got from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment because hey, it’s frickin Voltron and the first game in 25 years of the show’s existence. I know, you’re jealous.
6. Then wait while the site encodes it (still played Voltron). It was fairly quick really (you’ll see why below).
7. Copy the embed code and voila! Instantly embeddable video:

There are both a basic and a Flash uploader. I used the Flash one because it was the default and it worked, so why not.

Once the video is done uploading and encoding you can either add it to eBay or pull the embed code and drop it into your site (as I did here, sorry about the sound, I was on a bus going to Kruja, Albania when I took the video). Oh right, the search enhancer. It’s a small form on the video page where you can drop a link to the page where the video will be hosted and give a brief description as well. This gives extra data about the video for the search engines to pick up on, bonus!

Here’s a cool feature, say you re-shoot your video and need to replace it. With other services you might have to create all sorts of new URLs and embed codes. With Vzaar you just click ‘replace’ and upload your new video. Frickin Sweet!

Gee, I don’t know what else to tell you about the service after all that. It uploaded quickly, it encoded quickly and you can edit the title and search enhancer info at will. You can’t add any kind of subtitles or captions unfortunately which would be a massive bonus (a later service update?).

You do have the option to make a video public which means everyone on Vzaar will be able to see it. They’re using Encoding.com (another site we talked about in the past) so that’s the reason for the mega-fast encoding times. It also means they have the following options for input files.

The service accepts the following formats:

• asf – asf format
• avi – avi format
• flv – flv format
• m4v – raw MPEG4 video format
• mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 – QuickTime/MPEG4/Motion JPEG 2000 format
• wmv – Windows Media Video format
• mp3 audio files

The Dashboard

The main interface for your account offers a good deal of information including some summary statistics right on its main page. From here I went to settings and found quite possibly one of the coolest features of the whole thing. You can brand the video player with some text. That text is clickable, which means every video, in every video player has a clickable link to your site. So if you’re sharing videos across multiple platforms and sites, you have direct links back to your site or wherever you want. The drawback is there is only one link per account so you can’t have multiple places linked from the account if you perhaps do video distro for others. That means you’ll need an account for each one.

One Drawback

There are no playlists, that means there’s no way to drop pre,post-roll ads in to make money off of your content. That’s a damned shame if you ask me because you could then offset the monthly cost of your account by the revenue generated. Note to Vzaar: Work on that please? Perhaps a rev share that helps pay the monthly account?

Something not so obvious

I work on my netbook regularly. Lately I have run into a slew of web services that simply aren’t made for the 1024×600 pixel resolution. Popup windows that are larger than the screen, can’t be closed, don’t scroll with the page. Just generally poor web design. Vzaar has none of that. But I hate it so much when it does happen that I had to mention it here and the fact that their interface is crisp, clean and intuitive is yet another point for them. Something that certain services (which my overview of was so negative that it never made it to press) seem to forget to take into account.

Oh there’s some other stuff on the site as well like a profile so people know who you are and an affiliate program where you make money on everyone that signs up from your link like this one right here, yes this link is an affiliate link for Vzaar. Why did I put that in? I’ll tell you why.

That’s a wrap

In a world of half-assed services, quick money grabs, flim-flams, grifters, consumer-oriented sucker punches and all sorts of broken promises, Vzaar shines as keeping true to what it is. A highly versatile, easy-to-use, quick and painless way to upload and share video for commerical purposes. That’s something you can’t do on YouTube, will pay an arm and a leg to do elsewhere and if you want the do-it-yourself route (something like Kaltura Community Edition with JWplayer) will end up putting far more time into than signing up for Vzaar and using them. Hell, you could do far worse than these guys who really seem to have their business goals in hand and are working on implementing them. And no, I am not getting money from those affiliate links (ReelSEO is, so if you like what you see here, keep me employed, I mean….give them some love).

The service certainly seems to get two thumbs up, a golden basket of popcorn and er…alright, I’m all out of awards, a little silver astronaut for being a stellar service? Hell, I almost wish they would give me an account because I would certainly use them at Gamers Daily News even though there’s no way to monetize on the content…yet. Bravissimo, Bravissimo!

Related posts:

1. Vzaar Adds HD Video to eBay Selling Manager
2. EBay Videos for Ecommerce – Interview with Jamie Perkins of VZAAR
3. Reel Simple Syndication Service – New – Video Ads for Feeds
4. Adobe Making Video Script Search
5. Video Hosting Platform Finds Success with Video SEO