Opportunities | Part 3: The Potential Applications for Video are Everywhere

Feb 1, 2010 – New York, NY

Opportunities | The potential applications for video are everywhere

The implications of the growth and interactivity of video is a major challenge for the media industry and is part of debate about the future of media. While digital media is experiencing health growth and provides promising opportunities for content producers, marketers and brands, it is unclear how broadcasters and publishers will capitalize on these changes.

For business in general, the opportunities are more clear. From a competitive standpoint, any business interested in increasing effectiveness, improving efficiency or lowering costs needs to seriously look at video given the changes in the market place, capabilities of technology, and everyone’s expectations, knowledge and use of video.

The power of video to address one or more business challenges is compelling. Imagine if:

• product videos with overviews and descriptions were available on demand and searchable on Google;
• the knowledge of departing employees was captured on video beforehand;
• focus groups and interviews were cataloged by question or topic and made available to the appropriate business functions and management;
• customer feedback could be received that includes facial expressions, intonation, and intent;
• meetings, events and conferences could be recorded and made available to anyone in the company at any time; or
• that great sales pitch, turn of phrase or great conversation was captured, indexed and searchable.

For most businesses, almost every business function can be looked at from the perspective of how video can improve service delivery, customer feedback, knowledge management, marketing, sales, communications, public relations, training … the list goes on and on. A more detailed and longer list of applications for video can be found in “42 ways to use video to grow your business”. This article catalogues many ways to use video to grow business, including a rating of the popularity and growth potential of each idea.

Here are some examples of innovative and new ways to interact with video:

• Interactive video | Klickable.tv offers a product that creates a 'wrapper' around any video player, allowing users to add clickable tags throughout any video. This could be used for creating video 'treasure hunts', product tie-ins', character descriptions and more … kind of like creating a video based wiki.
• Searchable video (e.g. tags, metadata) | YouTube and Obama use indexed video to enable users to choose specific video segments from a longer speech. Check it out at mybarackobama.com.
• Shareable video | Video that is more interactive, shareable and searchable is moving beyond YouTube to anywhere on the web or mobile device. For example, here at Filemobile, we’ve developed several applications that are designed to share and interactive with video including a Media Community application and a Broadband Video application. Sheridan College’s Shine Brighter website uses the Media Community application to collect and share video. Vision TV leverages the Broadband Video application to distribute content online at video.visiontv.ca.
• User generated and contextual video | With webcams and video enabled phones, everyone is becoming a video producer. User Generated Content (UGC) can be used to engage customers through campaigns such as contests. Filemobile works in this area with a UGC Contest application. The related meta-data collected along with UGC video can be used to target content and messages to specific groups based upon criteria such as interests or location. Marketers such as Kraft have used UGC to create engaging national campaigns that have a local appeal. One example is the Kraft 10 in 10 contest, asking people to nominate their community in a cross-country competition.
• Transcribed video | Speakertext aligns transcript text with video to allow deep video integration with written content. Video segments can be selected and distributed to any website by choosing the relevant transcript text. This requires the manual alignment of transcribed text to video on setup but this transcription can be outsourced to services such Mechanical Turk.

As the old saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth at least a million.

Check out Part 1 | Evolution: Video, Not Just for TV Anymore.

Chris Becker
CEO – Filemobile Inc.

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Evolution | Part 1: Video, Not Just for TV Anymore

Feb 1, 2010 – New York, NY

Evolution in Video | Fundamental changes in what is possible

Do these phrases sound familiar?

“Did you see the clip on YouTube?”

“What! You don’t have a TIVO? I love mine. I can’t imagine watching TV without it.”

“I saw the trailer on iTunes today … I have to see that movie when its out.”

If they do, then you’ve been part of the emerging evolution of video.

In terms of our expectations for watching video, what passed for normal or standard just a few years ago is now becoming less and less acceptable. How quickly we forget that you actually had to wait until a certain time each day to watch your favorite sitcom or drama.

Underwriting these growing expectations are changes between the historical and emerging views of what is available to all of us in the world of video. Here are some examples:

So the evolution of video is expanding the art of the possible, but is there a market?

Check out Market | Part 2: Rapid Increases in Video Supply and Demand.

Chris Becker
CEO – Filemobile Inc.

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Steve Hulford Named to 2010 List of Digital Media People to Watch in Ontario

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