Digital Design Blog

Video Killed the Internet Star

Almost 4 billion minutes of human time are devoted to watching videos on YouTube per month, according to recent MediaMetrix reports. While that’s 18 billion minutes short of the time spent on Yahoo! Mail, and 3 billion short of the time whiled away on Yahoo! Messenger, it’s a whopping 1.5 billion more minutes than people spent searching Google.

If email was the first “killer app,” and search the second, video is fast becoming the third — and that’s with only a 40% overall broadband penetration rate in the US.

As with any emerging Internet phenomena, there is a rapidly emerging video landscape to comprehend and, for sure, a good degree of hype. Here’s how to start making sense of it all:

THE EXPERIENCE

Online Video Is Not TV Online
Web video didn�t take off in 2005 just because a bunch of people finally got around to posting their videos online. And it didn�t happen just because more people had a broadband connection, either (though that�s always helpful).

What changed in 2005 was the emergence of an ecosystem that provides context for online videos. With YouTube, MySpace, and their ilk, videos became not just a random file type you’d click a link to, and “open up” if you felt like it but part of a contextual page designed to allow users to store and interact with them, and connect them to other ideas, people, and even other videos. Videos became part of the digital world, instead of simply files accessed through it.

SEARCH + FIND
In the early days of the Web, getting your videos up online seemed easy enough. You put up a link to a file and there you were. However, that simple tactic failed to create the necessary infrastructure to support the widespread searching and finding of videos. This is changing. Video producers and posters are realizing that they need to do a little extra work to get their videos searchable — and therefore, findable. What’s required?

(Digital) Asset Management Systems
The term content management system is fairly well known in Web development circles these days, and this newer term “Digital Asset Management System (known as an AMS or DAM)” should be soon, too. An AMS/DAM, in many ways, is just a suped-up CMS, but one that�s also designed to house video, image, and multimedia files (and track their size, resolution versions and edited permutations).

Metadata
Video files need a lot of metadata to help identify them in your system and out on the Web. They come with some embedded tags describing their technical nature — things like duration, file size, file type, and default file name, but you’ll need to add (either manually or through some sort of script) other info to them�tags to identify them in human-readable and human-searchable form — such as name, category, intended audience, and even copyright and distribution limits. Some of these tags will be unique to you and your content — as well as the audience for it. For example, if your content and audience features a number of well-known actors, you may want your video files to be categorized or findable by those actors names. To do that, you’ll need to tag the individual files with specific actor tags.

If all of this seems like a lot to find, remember that very little of this info is particularly unique or new. It’s usually contained in scripts, production schedules, or even title credits — so, you may be able to leverage those offline documents or processes when you’re loading the videos into your DAM or Web site database.

Getting the User Involved
Beyond the basic metadata and the DAM, the most interesting way to make your videos easier to find is to connect them to the behaviors and actions of your audience. One way to do this is to let your audience “tag” them with their own meanings and favorite words. This kind of folksonomy-type tagging is what drives many social networking and Web 2.0-pioneer sites, like Flickr and Digg. User tagging is a low-level investment that produces tremendous rewards. It helps you better understand what your audience thinks of the content you produce and gives your audience an outlet to be heard.

Players and the Players That Make Them
One of the most confusing aspects of web video is video players. Though there are many players to choose from, they all tend to fall into one of three general categories, described in the chart below.

Stand-alone File Type Players
QuickTime, WindowsMedia, and RealNetworks players that launch in a separate — sometimes skinned — window to stream your videos have been around for years but haven�t evolved much. They are super easy to get up since they require almost no production work. But this stand-alone, link-out-and-pop-up-a-disembodied-window experience represents a real loss of an opportunity.

Embedded Flash + Silverlight Players
The new popular choice in the player space is one you’re already familiar with if you’ve used YouTube, played a video on MySpace, or explored most current sites with web video. The Flash player is the rectangular viewing screen typically embedded in all these pages. It often has very simple “Play” and “Stop” controls and the default screen often has a giant right-pointed arrow in the middle of it. Flash players feel quick and light, can be skinned to match many backgrounds, and can be accommodated in many different site layouts and structures. Since they are easy to integrate, they are used for snacking-style, playlist, and short-clip video-viewing behaviors. They are a great improvement on stand-alone players but they are not built for all situations.

Enhanced Players + Networks
While video snacking can generate hours of entertainment as well as significant ad revenues, it�s not the experience you want to create for all of your videos. Many users are increasingly looking to the Web to find full episodes of their favorite shows if not full motion picture films. That�s where enhanced video players offered by vendors like Brightcove and Move Networks come in. Using a player like this allows for the streaming of higher resolution�up to full HD quality — video footage in a specialized, movie, theater-like experience, though one that has contextual email/next clip hooks and greater user control of the stream.

THE BUSINESS
Videos are a great way to attract visitors but they can be expensive to produce. After all the talk of experience and design, it�s time for the bottom line: how to make money with online video. Here are some possibilities.

ADVERTISING

Pre-Roll & Post-Roll
To many people, particularly those with a TV background, pre-roll and post-roll advertising feels like the perfect way to produce a return on online video — and for that reason has become the most obvious go-to advertising plan with web video. Unfortunately, there is a serious flaw. These videos are commercials, sometimes slightly shorter than broadcast TV commercials, but still just commercials. And TV revenues are eroding because users have already declared their distaste for
commercials. Have we learned nothing about relevance at this point? Repeating a problematic advertising tactic in a whole new medium seems curious, at best, and purposefully alienating at worst. This has been reinforced in the market, with YouTube coming out against pre-roll and post-roll video in their late summer advertising announcements.

Display Ads
Another advertising option is to use ad banners (either Interactive Advertising Bureau-standard or custom) on the pages or even integrated in the players housing video content. The problem is that display ads don’t directly capitalize on the motion appeal of video — they’re just the same old web advertising tactic of years past, layered on a new technology. Pushing more banners may be an exercise in diminishing returns.

Overlays, Tickers, and Bugs
Another popular emerging option is the use of ad units that display in part of the video frame, though neither completely obscure nor delay the playing of the video you want to see. These ad units often take the form of overlays (covering the bottom fourth-to-third of the screen, as implemented on YouTube,) running tickers (as promoted through Video Egg,) or generic types of “bugs” (some of which could be used for product placement ecommerce solutions down the line.) They have
the benefit of not completely impeding video watching and offering a long-term solution for contextual placement, though they can be somewhat invasive and annoying, especially for first-time users.

Sponsorships
The most profitable short-term advertising option is to focus on sponsorships. If you’re a major site with significant traffic or niche appeal and/or you have a particularly talented sales team, you may be able to sell home page, category, or audience-oriented areas for large sums. We have some clients able to negotiate six-figure returns on major sponsorship placements. Users also tend to give this type of advertising tactic higher marks. These advertisements are usually done with more care — with an eye towards relevant placement and contextually interesting visual integration. CNET does
this regularly with its Gamespot background takeover placements, while Heavy.com uses the logo-block-header as a subtle and inventive ad sponsorship point.

DISTRIBUTION
Here’s a variation on one of the most common questions we hear from clients: should I hold my videos hostage, but safe and secure, on my own site, or, should I let them roam free throughout the greater Web, making new friends and picking up bad habits along the way? The answer is not simple. To a large extent, it depends on your audiences and your brand concerns, as well as the impact on your technology or advertising budgets.

Audience
For most companies — even the most popular film and TV studios — though, audiences aren’t die-hard loyalists, knocking down homepage doors day and night. Instead, most audiences are found all around the Internet — and would love to stumble across your video where they are — rather than having to go to you to find it. If they do stumble upon you�or better yet, get a link from a friend to you, they’re more likely to actually view your video or become your fan. So, if you’re audience isn�t already at your site, consider the idea that you might have to go to them, at least to help them come to you.

Brand
The scariest thing about Internet distribution for many media folks, particularly marketers, is the fear of defamation and brand damage. The thinking goes: every person who’s ever held a grudge against your company or just wants to cause you trouble is waiting for the day you release your content into the world so they can use it to bring your brand down. Soon, your well-crafted narratives, icons, and brand positioning will be reduced to Daily Show fodder, and your bottom line will hit an irrecoverable free fall.

Not likely. The reality is that the perception of your brand that gets voiced on the Web is the perception of your brand that already exists out in the world and is already influencing people’s buying decisions. Your brand is only as fragile online as it is offline. Distributing your assets across the Internet may open you up to louder voices, but they’re usually not new voices. And how you deal with them in this new conversational universe is still up to you — they don’t have stop you in your tracks. The upside is potentially very sweet. Broadening your reach through distribution may open you up to whole new audiences, market segments, and�in the end�paying customers. If you�ve got a strong product, why not take the chance?

by Marisa Gallagher