Online Video is hot!
It has been hard in the past to publish video on the web reliably, for a number of reasons, low bandwidth being the larger of the limiting factors. But there are many more users with fat bandwidth and big monthly quotas then there were 12 months ago. In November 2006 Australia’s largest internet provider Telstra, launched ADSL2+ and uncapped its ADSL1 services. Accordingly, the appetite for broadband has grown. Various reliable sources report :
- internet usage increased by 4% in 2007 to 74% of the population (ITU)
- there are approximately 5 million broadband connections australia-wide (OECD)
Video content authors have responded :
- regular TV programs especially news and current affairs are available for download shortly after broadcast
- extended programming, and behind the scenes material is published to TV network websites
Socially, video is devoured. YouTube has become the new ‘free-to-air’ TV channel for many households. The Funwall facebook application continues to fill with video referred to you by your friends.
Publishing video has become increasingly more convenient and accessible, particularly via mobile. YouTube now offers an upload service directly from your mobile phone or PDA. There are also a couple of Facebook applications that do the same thing, Zannel being one of them. A Brisbane company called Zacware have released a very easy to use video publishing tool called !SMACK! that can publish video directly to your YouTube or MySpace account. It converts your selected video file and uploads the video straight from your desktop.
Video and your business
The impacts of faster broadband and popular video based applications are already being felt by business. You can expect your customers will be looking for video content now more than ever and the appetite for video will continue to increase. Sites that offer related video content on their products and/or services pages stand to sell more. Video has greater potential (over other forms of content) to entertain and encourage enthusiasm in your products and services.
Tips for website owners:
- integrate video content in your website and ask your website solutions company to allow for video publishing via your content management system
- ensure your current hosting facility has the capacity to handle the larger than usual load associated with serving video files
- there is such a thing as ‘bad video’. Engage the services of a creative video publishing agency if you do not already have these creative services available to you
I think the challenge now is for online video to be relevant and used in such a way that it doesn’t become another passive medium for selling. I hate videos that are purely advertisements – they need to be clever – hence your last point about ‘bad video’ (nice example by the way).
I personally think online video is a great tool for online learning and probably for things such as demonstrating products in use – but how do you engage the user with online video without making them feel like they are watching another ad on TV?
Totally agree Chica. The web introduces a new ‘audience type’ for consideration by all video producers. Website owners and authors have typically structured their website projects around questions like “What does my audience want to read?”, now one also needs to ask “What does my audience want to watch?”
Does anyone know if Google or other search engines are able to figure out what is going on within a video? At the very least, someone should be working on a way to extract text or a transcript of what is being said in a video so that we can start searching for videos with more intelligence.
At this stage, I think the search engines are only using basic video meta data to gain an understanding of what a video is about. Google are scaling up their knowledge in this area. See this article regarding the Sale of Omnisio to Google. Viddler.com appears to be ahead of the game.
We’d be very interested to hear the author’s thoughts on You Tube vs video hosted on your website & then what impact this might have on search engine optimisation especially with Google?