EyeView's Blog

Online Video - A Medium In Flux

These days the only guarantee with online video is that what was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow. We are living in a period of rapid evolution where little remains the same for long.

A couple of articles caught my eye this week, because they reported facts which seemed to run counter to everything that we thought we knew until now.

First up was Jacqui Cheng writing in ars technica on the decline in P2P filesharing as online video streaming continues to grow. It seems like only yesterday when th No. 1 topic of geek conversation was the overwhelming percentage of internet traffic that was taken up by BitTorrent. According to the 2009 Global Broadband Report published by Sandvine "real-time entertainment traffic (video and audio streaming, Flash media, peercasting, placeshifting) accounts for 26.6 per cent of total traffic in 2009, up from 12.6 per cent in 2008." In the same period filesharing has declined by 25 per cent as people move towards wanting their content "on demand".

The second article backing this trend up comes from the ever-reliable Media section of the Guardian Online with a report by Mark Sweney on the viewing habits of Virgin Media's VoD customers. The article quotes Virgin Media boss, Neil Berkett, when he says that his customers spend more time watching VoD than they do with mainstream terrestrial UK channels Channel 4 and Channel Five. Again this runs contrary to previous thinking that VoD was a niche service that would not find the support from advertisers necessary to make it stick.

Streaming video is more popular and mainstream than ever as people are more selective about what they want and when they want it. Watch this space.

The Message Or The Medium

The BBC's political panel show Question Time celebrated its 30^th anniversary in September of this year. The format has remained mostly unchanged in that time with a chairman fielding questions from a live audience before a panel of invited guests usually representing each of the three major political parties in the UK and a journalist or representative of one of the smaller political parties.

The show, and the BBC, has attracted considerable criticism for extending an invitation for tonight’s live broadcast to Nick Griffin. In July of this year, Griffin was democratically elected to the European Parliament where he represents the British National Party (BNP) a far right party whose members have at various times made remarks that were anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, homophobic, in support of Holocaust denial and against mixed-race relationships. While Griffin has tried publicly to tone down some of the less-palatable aspects of his party’s manifesto, there is no denying the party’s (and his) roots in the murky world of British fascism.

Prior to broadcast, the debate has centered on whether or not Griffin should have been invited. Some people question whether the BBC, a state-funded broadcast company, should give a platform to a man whom many consider to be an unrepentant racist. The response of the BBC, until now, has been that it is merely the medium and that it would be wrong for the corporation to control the message. I don’t want to delve further into the ethics of this situation, but I do want to think about this distinction.

We know that online video increases engagement for the visitors to your site. We know that the more video they watch, the more likely they are to continue along the conversion path you have built for them. An engaged visitor is a contented visitor and is more likely to download, register or purchase.

My question today is how important is the medium and how important is the message? Is it enough to embed today’s most popular video on YouTube within your landing page to entertain your visitors? How big should such a video be? Could you turn the entire page into a screening room for the funniest clips and hope that prolonged exposure to such fare will cause them to click the download button out of sheer gratitude? In presenting the medium, how much responsibility will you take for the message?

Coming from the other side, should you prepare a video that delivers the right message clearly and articulately, hitting each of your marketing beats and presenting an overwhelming case for people to continue towards conversion and then use an clunky generic player to host it? Do you want someone else’s ads to appear on the player during and after your precision targeted pitch?

In other words, how should you divide your attention between the information you are trying to get across and the method you employ for doing so?

In the case of tonight’s Question Time, the BBC may be able to claim that they are doing nothing wrong, merely broadcasting someone else’s opinion. On your own website, you probably need to focus on the message just as much as the medium. Either one of them can negatively impact your site’s effectiveness, while doing them both well can significantly increase your conversion rate.

New UK Tax Legislation Means More Interesting Videos

In the past two years, the British government has made changes to the tax legislation that have particularly impacted independent contractors and the agencies that recruit and pay them.

Part of the new legislation exists to counter fraudulent claims of tax exemption and part of it seeks to ease the tax collection burden of small companies employing workers on an ad hoc project basis.

These changes have given rise to a new kind of company known as an “umbrella company” to manage the financial relationship between the contracted employee and his or her employer. The law makes it clear how these companies act and apart from the fees they charge and the level of service they offer there is very little room for any umbrella company to maneuver in terms of paying more or less tax than another similar company.

In a new market such as this it becomes important for the first company to offer a service online to concisely explain the offering and establish itself as the market leader for clarity and professionalism.

This was the brief we received from Excellium Umbrella, an umbrella company that manages salaries, taxes, travel expenses and meal subsistence claims all through a unique online portal.

None of this may be relevant to your situation, but if you take a look at this video, I think you will appreciate how complex ideas can be expressed in an engaging, informative and even entertaining way to build confidence with users and boost conversion over time.

A/B Testing Done Write

I’m really excited about the test we are currently running for our friends at Ginger Software. Ginger Software is a spelling and grammar checker which uses the context of the entire sentence “to facilitate error-free writing”.

It’s a great product that might have been aimed at people for whom English is a second language, but that is also tremendously useful for those of us who remain a little unsure about ‘principal’ and ‘principle’ or ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.

The A/B test running right now on Ginger’s homepage divides incoming traffic into two groups and offers each half one of two situations. Half the visitors will find a video player embedded in the page that autoplays the first time they arrive there. We know video is a persuasive medium for increasing conversion, and we also know that forcing people to watch by using autoplay can sometimes be controversial, so it will be interesting to compare the conversion rates for this half of the visitors with the figures previously achieved by the homepage.

The second group of visitors will be presented with the same homepage, but in place of the embedded video there will be a video initiation trigger. The trigger changes as you roll over it and if you click it the video opens in a lightbox player.

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

Another key difference with this player is that throughout the running time of the video there is a clear call-to-action button that sits on the player and directly reflects the call-to-action button on the site.

So, while the video is the same in each case, the method of delivery is very different. We will be closely tracking the conversion rates for each version and reporting our findings in this forum in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy the video.

Video Demos Are More Than Just Videos

It was gratifying to read Jason Kincaid’s piece in TechCrunch this week that he thoughtfully titled: The Underutilized Power Of The Video Demo To Explain What The Hell You Actually Do. If we disregard the fact that it might have been easier to make a video than to type that heading, Kincaid makes some strong points about the power of video to deliver something between an elevator pitch and a run through of your key features.

It’s a topic that I touched on back here when I blogged about Your Video Elevator Pitch, and it’s one that continues to have legs. Kincaid’s article focuses more on the value of video to show a product demo. While I agree completely that video should be a big part of your customer education program, I would argue that video has a more fundamental role to play on your site.

Kincaid uses the video made for Dropbox.com as an example of effective video. I watched the video on the Dropbox homepage and it does a great job of explaining the service. I was a little surprised though, when at the end of the video I was directed to go to their homepage. There was a great call to action at the close of the video to download the software, but there was no correlation between the call to action in the video and the Download Dropbox button that sat below the player. I was even concerned that the download button sat partially below the fold on my laptop screen making conversion less likely for the people who watch.

I guess the point is that a great video demo is part of the solution, but you also need to concern yourself with placement and conversion to ensure that you’re getting the best return on your investment.

As always with TechCrunch one of the most valuable parts of the article is the comments section. From there I got this great link that Andrew Angus over at Switch Marketing put together of Producers of Explanatory Videos.

Video Haiku and Anne Frank

Having worked with online video for many years now, it’s easy for me to forget the impact it can have on people.

I am surrounded by video professionals who know their craft and work hard to ensure that the video product they deliver arrives with the necessary impact and is concurrently able to tell a story.

Online video is a medium unlike any other as it values brevity over quality. In other words, your video doesn’t have to be shot by Spielberg nor your animations generated by the computers at Pixar to get the job done right as long as the job is done in as few seconds as possible.

Also, the stories told in online video are necessarily shorter. They are video haiku where the imposed limits force a more impressionistic sense of narrative that you usually find with longer forms.

When prepared and produced by an expert these online video haiku harness the power of words and images combined to deliver a compelling message that can be used to encourage, persuade or convince the viewer.

At other times serendipity may capture a fleeting glimpse of something and instantly turn a shared myth into something or someone painfully real.

I have seen thousands of online videos, but I can’t think of a single one that has moved me more than this silent, grainy, 20-second, black and white footage captured nearly 70 years ago in Amsterdam.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hvtXuO5GzU