The Enterprise rich-media Holy Grail?

Rich media (online video, interactive tours, virtual events) may provide richer viewer engagement, increase Brand preference and generate a vast amount of customer intelligence, but who’s really measuring it’s business Value?

The more actionable data you can measure, the more realistic trends you’ll get.

What content/topic is the most successful? What type of rich-media deliverable works the best? How did they interact within the online experience? How much social media heat does it have?

Finally, how did each of these perform throughout the customer journey? This would enable the design of a successful blueprint for your global communication programs and get funding to roll these out since you would be able to forecast:

Content and Delivery
(content performance, rich-media usability and performance data)

Impact on Sales
(Lead gen, shortened life cycle, increased size of sale)

Customer intelligence
(customer behavior, interests, preferences, identify where they are in the Sales process)

Sponsorship revenue
(video overlays, in-page promotions, sponsored media)

That first bullet makes everything else possible. If you don’t have attractive and informative content, and the way to deliver/measure it as effectively as possible, nothing else will follow.

Notes from Streaming Media West – Digital Evolution

This week is the Streaming Media West + Online Video Platform combo, In Los Angeles.

The least attended sessions so far were about the Enterprise, which makes sense because we’re in Hollywood-land (There were much bigger attendance in the silicon valley for these same sessions in the past).

However, some of the same topics popped up in regards to creating compelling content, what technologies people use to deliver across the 3 screens, integrated user experience, ROI (or lack there of if you’re not in the media and entertainment industry), etc.

HTML5 is the big elephant in the room here… Thanks Apple (for better or worse). The interest has grown steadily. The iPad pushed the issue for having HTML5 video playback. Companies have jumped on the bandwagon and competitors … are also jumping on it:

• Adobe helping HTML5 development/support
• Silverlight moving towards HTML5
• Online video platforms (Brightcove, Ooyala, etc.) HTML5 support out-of-the-box

The most entertaining session was about HTML5. It may have been the speaker, the content, the examples or all of the above. A bit on the techie side versus a use-case… but then again, the HTML5 specs aren’t fully fleshed-out yet and there are multiple standards… not a single standard.

Delivering video via HTML5 is good, but I will be looking forward to optimized web apps (including video and other rich-media elements) for cross-platform usage.

Digital Media ROI – tie to your CRM

I previously covered how to track some of the digital body language from your users. Next, you need to align that data to your Lead generation and customer relationship management systems. Which leads us to…

Step #2  – Tie your media metrics to your CRM

Digital Media ROI Tips

Most companies aren’t using digital media to improve productivity (lower operating costs), generate qualified leads (grow the bottom-line), enable monetization (grow the bottom-line again) or improve Brand loyalty (long-term revenue) for their business. Why is that?

I’ve been surprised at some of the answers I’ve heard on this topic while interviewing various companies

TV Everywhere… as a web service

TV viewership has changed. With the emergence of online video and DVRs, people are empowered to curate their preferred content, pull it up in seconds on their computer screen or mobile device while being able to control, participate and share their experiences. So what we think of TV-programming today, is on its way to become a web service tomorrow.

Our telephone calls, letters, chats can be all done online. Our everyday communications are already headed towards a web service… and the FCC plans to do something about it

In order to accommodate this, our technical infrastructure needs to be upgraded. Every household will need to have a +5MBps bandwidth (unless we find a more efficient data compression method) and every household will have to connect to a web service for their shopping, phone, video, gaming, social activities. The current digital infrastructure isn’t ready yet to handle the load.

Will TV-Everywhere be the next dotcom boon for the high tech industry? I’m pretty sure this will require some massive data storage, high-performance computing and network management capabilities.

Progress Towards Open and Online Video Ecosystem

Business partnerships can seldom make a big splash in the industry, however today is a big day in the adoption of an Online Video Platform across web platforms/services.

Digital Media End-to-End Solution, Powered By…

Providing an end-to-end digital media work flow solution from capture to display should be getting simpler with technological advances. Yet, due to the ongoing media convergence and TV-Everywhere solutions, everything seems to be more complex than ever.

Nowadays, you need

Dear OVPs: Let’s open it up – Part 1

On February 1st 2010, an Online Video Platform (OVP) called thePlatform introduced their new MPX beta aimed at simplifying online video content management. As per an earlier entry, each OVP is providing a front end management console built upon their Content Management System (CMS).

Each OVP’s Content Management Systems are different, but for the most part do exactly the same thing in a myriad of ways. The issue for a potential customer is to find out what CMS would work best for their media workflow, information architecture and how to tie it into their web CMS or Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS).

The “one-stop-shop” approach of OVPs can actually make life harder for their clients. It might be in the best interest of the OVP industry to find ways to leverage the customer’s CMS. This would allow OVPs to compete on providing the simplest CMS integration, as well as developing intuitive/value-add front-end console to manage your video assets, players, etc. This would also open the door for easier migration between OVPs, which would contribute in developing a healthy competitive space.

Going forward, specialized technology shops (for live streaming, monetization, syndication, reporting, etc.) could just be a ‘plug-in’ that would extend an OVP in order for clients to use best-of-breed technologies for their business needs and budget constraints. Right now, OVPs cover a lot of services. Some of them do a better job at one thing than another. Would OVP users want a single provider do 100 things at 1% in a closed ecosystem or 1 thing at 100% in an open space?

(hint: Let’s open it up and see the best solution win!)

Where All OVPs Fail

Let’s say you’ve gone through the work of having your company agree to use an OVP (versus the “free” YouTube alternative) and you’ve done your due diligence in picking the most appropriate one for your functional/integration needs to reach your business goals and digital workflow. By now, you’re fully dependent on the OVP’s financial future and product roadmap (even if they have full-blown APIs for extensibility). But, what if you want to switch OVPs after you’ve created thousands of video posted everywhere from internal and external blogs, product pages, that you may or may not be able to control?

Online Video Platform Summit Debrief

Way overdue, but still relevant… This post will cover main conversation points that were discussed at the various sessions of the OVPS ’09 back in November. If you’re interested in upcoming industry trends in online video and monetization, feel free to read on…