[David Strom's Web Informant] 16 November 2009: The evolution of Web-based enterprise video

[David Strom]

Web Informant 16 November 2009: The evolution of Web-based enterprise video

This week Brightcove begins a new lower-priced video service called
Express that starts at $100 a month and offers some impressive
features. I'm glad to see them in this space, which is still very much
in the pre-Guttenberg publishing era. I thought I would take this
moment to talk about some of the issues involved in publishing Web
videos for corporate uses, putting aside all the tectonic shifts that
are happening in the Web entertainment arena for another essay.
http://www.brightcove.com/en/video-platform/editions-and-pricing

To put things in perspective, realize that it took only a few years
for the Web to evolve from its first crude text-only efforts to a full
graphical experience. Yet it has taken more than a decade to get
videos inside the browser page. And while there are dozens of video
streaming service providers, including Brightcove, Wistia, Fliqz and
Kaltura, that offer ways of delivering videos, none of them are as
easy to use as they could be, and almost none of them offer one-stop
solutions for publishers.

In the last year I have spent a lot of time with video publishing as a
result of my five-minute screencast videos, where I write, review,
narrate and produce everything about a particular product. The
product's vendor sponsors each video that appears on my
WebInformant.tv site along with 20 other places around the Internet.

Just take a look at the most popular Web content creation tool of the
moment, Wordpress, as a good case in point. If you create your own
blog and host it using Wordpress.com, you can purchase a "space
upgrade" for $20 a year and start uploading video content. But if you
decide that you want more control over your page design and host your
blog on your own Web server, this space upgrade option isn't available
and you have to dive into the nasty world of third-party video player
plug-ins. Even though you are still using Wordpress software. It is
these sorts of gotchas that can drive you crazy, or keep me fully
employed explaining them.

All of these video services operate in some broad basic ways. After
you prepare your video, you upload it to their server and then
annotate it with any supporting text, keywords, and other information.
You are then given a bunch of HTML code to embed the video player into
your Web page. When you view the page, you see a player that you can
click on and control the video playback, just as you would come to
expect from YouTube et al. The special embed code contains tracking
information that the service collects and then offers reports so you
can see who watched what videos.

The service that I use at the moment is Wistia.com. Their most basic
plan starts at less than $40 a month, and offers some very
sophisticated tracking and embedding features. Their video player is
very clean and crisp, and I haven't had too many reports about
playback quality issues from my site. I recommend that you start with
them and see if they meet your needs, and if not then you might want
to ask the following questions:

First, do you need a branded player for your videos? Meaning that you
have your logo somewhere on the first or end screen, or underneath the
video image. For some people, this is important. Some services offer a
single player, like Wistia, while others, such as Brightcove, give you
more stylistic choices.

Second, do you need control over the ultimate size of the video image
on your Web site? The various hosting services either offer this
explicitly, or else (like the basic plan from Fliqz.com) leave it up
to you to edit their embed codes that they provide for you to copy and
paste into your Web page. If you have to manually edit the code, you
want to maintain the aspect ration (horizontal to vertical) so your
video displays correctly. (It helps if you produce your video for the
ultimate intended size that it will appear on your Web site, too.)

Third, how big of an audience do you expect for your videos? Given
that these are targeted at potential customers and not people looking
for the latest skateboarding cats or guys gone wild, you should set
expectations accordingly: several thousand views over a period of a
few months is a good audience. Some of the services, like Wistia,
charge by playbacks per month. Brightcove charges on the number of
individual videos and on your bitstream consumption, which is harder
to estimate. Kaltura offers a free Wordpress plug-in for hosting up to
10 GB of monthly video data.

Fourth, what kinds of reports and features are available from your
service provider? With some services like Fliqz and Brightcove, their
more expensive plans give you more features and choices.

Finally, what else is or isn't included in the service? One of the
things that I like about Wistia is the ability to share the video
project with a number of collaborators, such as my clients, who can
view the video directly, without my having to email them a huge
attachment.

As you can see, there is a still a lot to deal with when it comes to
Web videos. If you have another site that you would like to recommend,
please let me know on my Strominator blog. And if you are a subscriber
of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, you can listen to me and Sam talk
about some of these video hosting and production issues on a Webinar
that we will host this coming Thursday afternoon. For those of you
that aren’t subscribers, I will post my Powerpoint slides on my
slideshare.net/davidstrom account afterwards.