-
Red Sox to Produce It Gets Better Online Video
Cracking open the Boston Globe yesterday (yes, I still read a physical newspaper on weekends!), I was pleased to read that our home town Red Sox will be the latest major league baseball team planning to create an online video in support of the "It Gets Better Project." If you're not familiar with It Gets Better, it's an organization started last fall by columnist Dan Savage to show support for lesbian and gay youth who often suffer harassment.
It Gets Better has quickly become a textbook example of how powerful user-generated video can be when directed toward a particular goal. Thousands of It Gets Better videos have been produced, including many from celebrities. I've watched a sample of them and they range from the amateur level all the way to some very slick productions. The key is that the videos convey the producer's passion and authenticity in a way no other medium could.
As the Globe article describes, in the Red Sox case, a petition was started by a 12-year-old fan who collected over 10,000 signatures to help spur the Red Sox on. It's a great story, and further shows how omnipresent online video has become in our society. No doubt many other organizations will be trying to emulate It Gets Better's success with video to help raise awareness for their cause as well.Categories: UGC
Topics: It Gets Better, Red Sox
-
Teaser: More Video Ad Innovation Coming Next Week
A little teaser for this Friday morning: next week is going to bring a number of announcements of new video advertising innovations, particularly for mobile devices. The announcements will be synched with ELEVATE: Online Video Advertising Summit, coming up next Tuesday, June 7th. This week I've been getting a preview of some of the news from various technology providers and it's exciting stuff that will no doubt help accelerate the market.
A key underlying theme I am continually hearing from technology providers for online and mobile video advertising is their desire to help move ad dollars over from TV (or at a minimum to have online and mobile become complimentary media buys). But, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, TV advertising is still a "known" commodity, whereas it's still early for online and mobile and there are a lot of question marks. Technology providers are united in their goal of helping premium video content providers improve their monetization and are innovating at a furious pace in order to demonstrate the advantages over TV.
Stay tuned next week for some cool updates.Categories: Advertising, Mobile Video
Topics: ELEVATE
-
Clearleap Looks to Power More Cable iPad Apps
Large cable operators like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision have launched popular iPad apps over the past 6 months, and now technology provider Clearleap is looking to help get other cable operators into the iPad app game (as well as apps for other connected devices). This morning Clearleap is announcing a set of APIs for its Stream On Demand product that allow developers to quickly create an app's front-end user experience while having the back-end processes fulfilled without any custom development.
iPad and other connected device apps are a critical part of cable operators' larger TV Everywhere strategies of unlocking cable programming from the set-top box and allowing subscribers to watch programming anytime, anywhere and on any device. However, the proliferation of devices, and the need to have programming delivered securely, has created significant complexity and cost to accomplish this goal. Underscoring the challenges, even the largest operator, Comcast, only just last week announced its Xfinity TV app would support video streaming to iPhones/iPod Touches, and it has yet to release this for any Android device. For mid-size and smaller operators who don't have the same resources, iPad and other apps are out of reach.
Categories: Cable TV Operators, Devices, Technology
-
ELEVATE Conference Update: 400+ Registrants, 50+ Speakers, 20+ Sessions
We are less than a week from ELEVATE: Online Video Advertising Summit, next Tuesday, June 7th, in NYC, and momentum is building. There are now over 400 industry executives registered, and the program is 100% complete,
with over 50 different speakers appearing on more than 20 individual sessions throughout the day. If you're an online video ad industry executive or an executive in the larger online video industry, ELEVATE will be the place to be next Tuesday.
There are executives signed up from many of the world's leading brands, agencies, content publishers, technology providers and other ecosystem participants. Here's a sampling of some of those registered - from brands: Bank of America, Bose, General Mills, GlaxoSmithKline, L'Oreal, Pepsi, Pfizer, Unilever and others, from agencies: Digitas, Hill Holiday, Horizon Media, Ketchum, Mediacom, Mediavest, Ogilvy, Publicis, RG/A, Wieden + Kennedy and others, from content publishers: A&E, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBCU, Gannett, MTV, Rodale, Scripps, Sony Music, Sony Pictures, The New York Times, The Weather Channel, Univision, Warner Bros, WebMD and others. In addition to all of these executives, many industry technology providers will be in attendance (including ELEVATE's 26 sponsors) along with investors, analysts, press, etc. In short, it will be a vibrant, diverse group, providing outstanding networking.
Categories: Events
Topics: ELEVATE
-
Four Comcast Announcements Show Importance of Digital Video
Last week brought four rapid-fire announcements from Comcast,
underscoring how the company is ramping up its digital video delivery efforts and the PR surrounding them. The announcements were:
5/23 - Xfinity TV App version 1.5, with video streaming capability, available on iPhone and iPod Touch. Leading off the week was news that Comcast's Xfinity TV app had been updated so that iPhone and iPod Touch users can now watch streaming video on these devices (Xfinity TV streaming was made available on the iPad in February, and is not yet available on Android, though other features of the app are). Comcast said this was the number one most requested feature from users.
Categories: Cable TV Operators
Topics: Comcast
-
YouTube Has Been a Home Run for Google and the Online Video Industry
Back in October, 2006, when Google announced its intention to acquire YouTube, the fledgling, but already-dominant video upload/sharing site, for $1.65 billion, many observers thought it was a wild swing by Google, and
further evidence of its profligate ways. Critics cited YouTube's thin UGC-based business model, its minimal revenues and its skyrocketing hosting/delivery costs caused by surging usage. Even though the deal was all in stock, it indeed looked like a rich price, and an unjustifiably huge short-term reward to YouTube's founders and investors.
Yet yesterday's news from YouTube, that a staggering 48 hours of video are now uploaded to the site each minute, and that it hit a recent peak of 3 billion video views in a single day, both underscore how YouTube has been a home run for both Google and for the larger online video industry. YouTube's ongoing viewership dominance is a rare "winner take all" situation in which second place video upload/sharing competitors are practically off the radar screen. Google now owns the dominant asset in one of the fastest-growing sectors of the Internet, which has huge revenue potential as consumer adoption of online video and devices soars. That $1.65 billion looks cheap now, all the more so given the durability of Google's own robust ad business.
Categories: Aggregators
-
5 Great Reasons to Attend ELEVATE on Tuesday, June 7th
It's been a whirlwind few months of planning, but everything is now justabout in place for ELEVATE: Online Video Advertising Summit on Tuesday, June 7th in NYC. Admittedly I'm biased, but I sincerely believe it will be the premier event of the year for online video industry executives. Here are 5 great reasons to attend:
Categories: Events
Topics: ELEVATE
-
Brightcove Expands Beyond Video, Introduces "App Cloud" Platform
Brightcove is introducing a new product this morning called Brightcove App Cloud, a platform which allows content publishers to build and manage apps and "touch" web sites for iOS and Android devices. The move is the first
product expansion beyond video since Brightcove's inception. Brightcove is also announcing that it has changed the name of its video platform to Brightcove Video Cloud and that it is positioning the company as a "cloud content services company." Brightcove's SVP of Marketing Jeff Whatcott brought me up to speed on all the moves late yesterday.
The App Cloud initiative is based on feedback from content customers that it is becoming increasingly necessary for them to develop content experiences for smartphones, tablets, connected devices and social media sites like Facebook, all of which go beyond traditional web sites. However, these requirements have introduced massive complexity and cost to content publishers, forcing companies to choose between creating low-end apps using "app factory" tools (as Jeff described), or more custom experiences leveraging native SDKs. This tradeoff between the former's strong affordability and reach vs. the latter's flexibility and power has created what Brightcove sees as a gap in the market for a robust "app platform."
Categories: Technology
Topics: Android, Brightcove, iOS
VideoNuze Posts
Connect with VideoNuze
Exclusive News Roundup
- China’s Hisense Launches Branded FAST Channels Media Play News
- Netflix Wraps Upfront With 'Doubled Commitments' Mediapost
- Tubi Expands Partnerships With MrBeast, Other Creators The Hollywood Reporter
- The NFL’s Next Big Play: Owning the Media The Hollywood Reporter
- A Hollywood Start-Up Targets the Micro Drama Craze NY Times
- Hub: Streaming bundles boost customer loyalty The Desk
