Original Story: Money.CNN.com
Just when you thought it couldn't get any easier to order pizza ...
Later this year, the streaming video service Hulu will serve up a Pizza Hut advertisement that allows viewers to order a pizza right within the ad.
The feature combines Pizza Hut's online ordering system with Hulu's interactive advertising system. It's the kind of thing that could become more common as companies take advantage of emerging interactive ad capabilities.
Mike Hopkins, the chief executive of Hulu, promoted the Pizza Hut ad campaign at Hulu's annual presentation for advertisers in New York on Wednesday. He called the ad an "in-stream purchase unit" and said other advertisers could use it to initiate product sales in the future.
Hopkins also promoted the fact that whatever TV show a viewer is watching will resume right after the order -- in this case, for a 3-Cheese Stuffed Crust Pizza or a comparable delicacy -- is placed. Pizza Hut is owned by Yum! (YUM, Fortune 500) Brands.
Hulu, which is owned by the parent companies of ABC, Fox and NBC, includes ads on both its free and paid streaming services. This differentiates it from the ad-free services of two rivals: Netflix (NFLX) and Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) Prime.
Hopkins also promoted other ad innovations, including 360-degree ads for mobile devices. He showed an example for a car company that let a user look up, down and around from the drivers' seat of a car, taking advantage of the accelerometers inside some smart phones.
Hulu's free service is currently only available on desktop computers, while its subscriber service, Hulu Plus, works on phones, tablets and other devices. But Hulu said it would enable part of its free service on phones this summer.
Hopkins also confirmed what has been widely reported for months: Hulu is in what he called "active discussions" with cable and satellite distributors to "integrate Hulu Plus into their set-top-boxes."
Netflix is also in talks with distributors about making its streaming service available through set-top-boxes, and announced several deals with small distributors last week. To top of page
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Showing posts with label video marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video marketing. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
Friday, May 14, 2010
Video Search Still a Tough Nut to Crack
Computer World
While text-based search services such as Google's and Microsoft Bing now come pretty close to consistently serving up what users seek, video search services remain inexact at best, said video archiving experts who spoke on a panel at last week's WWW2010 conference.
Yet the panelists agreed that video searching techniques must improve exponentially if people are to use the growing amount of video footage now stored on the Internet and elsewhere.
"If the material is searchable, it will be useful to the public," said video archiving consultant Jackie Ubois, who moderated the panel during the conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Hans Westerhof, director of the Images for the Future program for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, explained the urgency for developing better video search.
In 2005, the Institute started a program to digitize its vast video archive. About 280,000 hours of video and audio footage, including movies, television shows and news footage, will be digitized. About 100,000 hours of footage have already been converted, taking up 3 petabytes of storage space, and the archive is expected to grow to 14 petabytes by 2015.
The problem the Institute faces with all this video footage is making it easy to find. Many of the older source reels of film had little if any metadata, or descriptive data. Reels of old television programs, for instance, had just the barest amount of information, such as the title of the program and the date it was shown. No information was included about the content of the program.
"For the material to be useful, we need metadata," he said. The act of creating metadata should be automated wherever possible. "Traditional cataloging does not work at this scale," he said.
Right now, the Institute for Sound and Vision is looking at automated ways of extracting data from the video, using tools such as speech and image recognition.
But developing tools for automatically cataloging video is much harder than developing the tools used to tag text content for a variety of reasons.
Video, unlike text, can only be reduced to individual pixels, which offer no information about the video as a whole, said Paul Over, the project leader for a National Institute of Standards and Technology program to stimulate development of better video search. A block of text, on the other hand, can be reduced into a series of words, the definitions of which are known, and can be analyzed to give a greater summary of the whole document.
Video has "no correlate to the word," he said, making video harder to catalog.
"Video is not easy. It is hard to extract the structure," said Marko Grobelnik, the program manager for the VideoLectures.net service on online lectures. "We still struggle with basic problems like object recognition."
Jamie Davidson, who is the product manager for search and algorithmic discovery at Google's YouTube, noted that Google is also trying new algorithms to help bring some context to the videos that get uploaded to the site.
For instance, software can determine if the video is a common event, such as a music concert, in order to help identify the content. It can make note of where the video was uploaded from, to allow users to narrow their searches to specific geographic regions.
But YouTube still faces challenges of search and classification, especially given the whimsical nature of many of its videos. He showed a brief clip of a prairie dog turning dramatically around before the camera, with accompanying music. The title to this clip is "dramatic chipmunk," which would be hard for someone seeking out the video to guess.
People may also look for videos for a wide variety of reasons, Over explained. For instance, a casual Web surfer may be looking for some entertaining clip. An intelligence analyst can be looking for background information and may not care why the video was taken. A documentarian or news organization may be looking for stock footage of a particular time and place. It would be hard to tag a video in such a way that it could be found by all these users.
As an example, Over showed a brief clip of a woman running across a plaza, frightening off a bunch of pigeons, before slipping and falling on the wet bricks.
"How might you tag this so it would be reusable?" he asked, before running down a list of obvious descriptions: "Woman, pigeons, plaza, daytime, outdoors, falling." In fact, the person who uploaded the video tagged it only with the phrase "stupid sister."
The tag "is very personal, and means something to that person, but it is not useful" for reuse by others, he said.
The NIST program sets out a series of challenges each year for improving the state of automated video search, using actual video footage as a test of success. The idea is to develop algorithms that can tag footage as equally well as humans, pinpointing people, objects, locations and even specific events within the video.
One approach was to build up a set of what he calls "recognizers," or objects or events that could be recognized by algorithms for YouTube SEO. The software could ask, "Does this shot contain a classroom? Does it contain a chair? Is there singing going on?" and apply the specific tags. The more recognizers, the more robust the software would be in capturing valuable attributes of the footage.
Progress is being made: In previous years, the program used nightly news broadcasts and airport video surveillance footage as the data set to test new video search systems and technologies. This year, however, the program will use video footage from the Internet Archive, which offers a greater diversity of material.
"As particular approaches, or algorithms, get incorporated into different systems, they get tested on different data and [to] prove they work again and again," Over said.
While such tools have come a long way in the past few years, there is much more work yet to be done to bring them to levels of commercial usability, the panel agreed. While seeing that tools may be useful eventually, "I don't see us using them in the near future," said the Institute for Sound and Vision's Westerhof.
Yet the panelists agreed that video searching techniques must improve exponentially if people are to use the growing amount of video footage now stored on the Internet and elsewhere.
"If the material is searchable, it will be useful to the public," said video archiving consultant Jackie Ubois, who moderated the panel during the conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Hans Westerhof, director of the Images for the Future program for the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, explained the urgency for developing better video search.
In 2005, the Institute started a program to digitize its vast video archive. About 280,000 hours of video and audio footage, including movies, television shows and news footage, will be digitized. About 100,000 hours of footage have already been converted, taking up 3 petabytes of storage space, and the archive is expected to grow to 14 petabytes by 2015.
The problem the Institute faces with all this video footage is making it easy to find. Many of the older source reels of film had little if any metadata, or descriptive data. Reels of old television programs, for instance, had just the barest amount of information, such as the title of the program and the date it was shown. No information was included about the content of the program.
"For the material to be useful, we need metadata," he said. The act of creating metadata should be automated wherever possible. "Traditional cataloging does not work at this scale," he said.
Right now, the Institute for Sound and Vision is looking at automated ways of extracting data from the video, using tools such as speech and image recognition.
But developing tools for automatically cataloging video is much harder than developing the tools used to tag text content for a variety of reasons.
Video, unlike text, can only be reduced to individual pixels, which offer no information about the video as a whole, said Paul Over, the project leader for a National Institute of Standards and Technology program to stimulate development of better video search. A block of text, on the other hand, can be reduced into a series of words, the definitions of which are known, and can be analyzed to give a greater summary of the whole document.
Video has "no correlate to the word," he said, making video harder to catalog.
"Video is not easy. It is hard to extract the structure," said Marko Grobelnik, the program manager for the VideoLectures.net service on online lectures. "We still struggle with basic problems like object recognition."
Jamie Davidson, who is the product manager for search and algorithmic discovery at Google's YouTube, noted that Google is also trying new algorithms to help bring some context to the videos that get uploaded to the site.
For instance, software can determine if the video is a common event, such as a music concert, in order to help identify the content. It can make note of where the video was uploaded from, to allow users to narrow their searches to specific geographic regions.
But YouTube still faces challenges of search and classification, especially given the whimsical nature of many of its videos. He showed a brief clip of a prairie dog turning dramatically around before the camera, with accompanying music. The title to this clip is "dramatic chipmunk," which would be hard for someone seeking out the video to guess.
People may also look for videos for a wide variety of reasons, Over explained. For instance, a casual Web surfer may be looking for some entertaining clip. An intelligence analyst can be looking for background information and may not care why the video was taken. A documentarian or news organization may be looking for stock footage of a particular time and place. It would be hard to tag a video in such a way that it could be found by all these users.
As an example, Over showed a brief clip of a woman running across a plaza, frightening off a bunch of pigeons, before slipping and falling on the wet bricks.
"How might you tag this so it would be reusable?" he asked, before running down a list of obvious descriptions: "Woman, pigeons, plaza, daytime, outdoors, falling." In fact, the person who uploaded the video tagged it only with the phrase "stupid sister."
The tag "is very personal, and means something to that person, but it is not useful" for reuse by others, he said.
The NIST program sets out a series of challenges each year for improving the state of automated video search, using actual video footage as a test of success. The idea is to develop algorithms that can tag footage as equally well as humans, pinpointing people, objects, locations and even specific events within the video.
One approach was to build up a set of what he calls "recognizers," or objects or events that could be recognized by algorithms for YouTube SEO. The software could ask, "Does this shot contain a classroom? Does it contain a chair? Is there singing going on?" and apply the specific tags. The more recognizers, the more robust the software would be in capturing valuable attributes of the footage.
Progress is being made: In previous years, the program used nightly news broadcasts and airport video surveillance footage as the data set to test new video search systems and technologies. This year, however, the program will use video footage from the Internet Archive, which offers a greater diversity of material.
"As particular approaches, or algorithms, get incorporated into different systems, they get tested on different data and [to] prove they work again and again," Over said.
While such tools have come a long way in the past few years, there is much more work yet to be done to bring them to levels of commercial usability, the panel agreed. While seeing that tools may be useful eventually, "I don't see us using them in the near future," said the Institute for Sound and Vision's Westerhof.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Tips For Choosing a Video Platform
Story from Streaming Media
Let’s assume that you’re a small to mid-size non-media company seeking to use video to acquire or retain customers, train your employees, and, perhaps, communicate with investors, and you’re considering inexpensive alternatives for distributing the video. You have three basic approaches.
First, you can encode the video files yourself, create the necessary player and all the links, and upload the files to your own website, similarly to the medical videos posted by Video MD. As long as viewing numbers stay fairly modest, this approach should work from a technology standpoint, though it may not be the optimal approach for accomplishing the goals that you have for your videos.
The second alternative is to host your videos on a free, user-generated content (UGC) website such as Vimeo or YouTube or even on a social networking site such as Facebook. These UGC sites relieve you of the encoding and player-creation chores and assume the task of hosting and distributing the video for you. You can still embed the video on your own website, but by offering your video on a UGC site, you also expand the number of potential viewers, which can help from a marketing perspective. However, there are some negatives to consider, as well as some benefits that are only possible via the third alternative.
That alternative is to use a fee-based service to host and distribute your videos for you. Multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) online video platform vendors offer hosting, encoding, customizable players, and detailed statistics to help you maximize the effectiveness of your video. They help distribute your video to other sites to acquire more viewers and provide interactivity that lets viewers click the video to advance to the next step in the sales cycle, as well as other features. Even a few short months ago, these types of features would have cost hundreds of dollars per month. Today, however, depending upon the amount of video you distribute, you can sign on for less than $20 a month, with one service offering unlimited video views for less than $50 a month.
This article will review the costs and the benefits of all three alternatives. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, any business seeking to truly leverage the value of its video should at least be familiar with the benefits of the second and third alternatives. Many businesses will find that an amalgam of these two is the best option of all.
We've also created a list of the nearly 50 UGC and SaaS online video platforms on the market today. Click here to download the Online Video Platforms PDF. (If you are an online video platform that wishes to be included on this list, please contact Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen.)
Hosting Your Own
Let’s start with hosting your own distribution site. Here, the primary benefits are cost and control. You control the quality of the videos and who sees them. And since you’re posting the videos to your own website, adding more videos won’t cost you a thing. Or will it?
Let’s examine that “free” concept. Most small companies don’t have video production capabilities in-house, but if you’re using a third-party videographer, it’s relatively simple to encode your video into a streaming format—just another export option from the software video editor. However, you probably don’t have the expertise to choose a codec (H.264, VP6, or VC-1), select a player (Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, or Silverlight), or specify general encoding parameters such as resolution, data rate, or frame rate, not to mention advanced parameters such as variable bitrate encoding, B-frame interface, and CABAC versus CAVLC.
Depending upon your choice of technologies, you may have to create a player (Flash or Silverlight), which will likely require programming resources, and you’ll have to create the HTML links to embed the video into your webpage. None of this stuff is rocket science, but it will either take time, money, or both to acquire this knowledge and expertise. And all of these tasks will be fully assumed by any of the companies available in the second and third categories. So unless you’re a streaming guru or you play one on TV, hosting your own videos isn’t free.
In addition, consider what you’re giving up by hosting your own videos. At a very high level, UGC sites deliver two benefits: content delivery and community. UGC sites are in charge of making sure that your video gets delivered to your target viewers at sufficient bitrates that ensure high-quality viewing, and they are almost certainly better equipped to handle that than your web-hosting provider or your own self-hosted site. Beyond that, UGC sites, if chosen correctly, can deliver community or, if you prefer, viewers, which is critical if your videos are designed to market your products and services.
The Advantages of UGC Sites
UGC sites deliver additional viewers in several ways. First, sites such as YouTube have morphed into ad hoc Yellow Pages for viewers searching for any number of things. If you’re unconvinced, I have an excellent example. If you had a potential medical malpractice claim in New York, where would you go to find a lawyer? A phone book? The bar association? That’s where I would look. But if you search for “medical malpractice New York” on YouTube, you’ll find a video from an attorney that was uploaded in July 2008. The video had been viewed 61,693 times when I wrote this article—obviously, it will have been viewed many more times by the time you read this (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Think that YouTube is a waste of time? With 61,693 views in a matter of 7 months, attorney Robert Sullivan might disagree.
Read Entire Article at Streaming Media
Story from Streaming Media
Let’s assume that you’re a small to mid-size non-media company seeking to use video to acquire or retain customers, train your employees, and, perhaps, communicate with investors, and you’re considering inexpensive alternatives for distributing the video. You have three basic approaches.
First, you can encode the video files yourself, create the necessary player and all the links, and upload the files to your own website, similarly to the medical videos posted by Video MD. As long as viewing numbers stay fairly modest, this approach should work from a technology standpoint, though it may not be the optimal approach for accomplishing the goals that you have for your videos.The second alternative is to host your videos on a free, user-generated content (UGC) website such as Vimeo or YouTube or even on a social networking site such as Facebook. These UGC sites relieve you of the encoding and player-creation chores and assume the task of hosting and distributing the video for you. You can still embed the video on your own website, but by offering your video on a UGC site, you also expand the number of potential viewers, which can help from a marketing perspective. However, there are some negatives to consider, as well as some benefits that are only possible via the third alternative.
That alternative is to use a fee-based service to host and distribute your videos for you. Multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) online video platform vendors offer hosting, encoding, customizable players, and detailed statistics to help you maximize the effectiveness of your video. They help distribute your video to other sites to acquire more viewers and provide interactivity that lets viewers click the video to advance to the next step in the sales cycle, as well as other features. Even a few short months ago, these types of features would have cost hundreds of dollars per month. Today, however, depending upon the amount of video you distribute, you can sign on for less than $20 a month, with one service offering unlimited video views for less than $50 a month.
This article will review the costs and the benefits of all three alternatives. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, any business seeking to truly leverage the value of its video should at least be familiar with the benefits of the second and third alternatives. Many businesses will find that an amalgam of these two is the best option of all.
We've also created a list of the nearly 50 UGC and SaaS online video platforms on the market today. Click here to download the Online Video Platforms PDF. (If you are an online video platform that wishes to be included on this list, please contact Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen.)
Hosting Your Own
Let’s start with hosting your own distribution site. Here, the primary benefits are cost and control. You control the quality of the videos and who sees them. And since you’re posting the videos to your own website, adding more videos won’t cost you a thing. Or will it?
Let’s examine that “free” concept. Most small companies don’t have video production capabilities in-house, but if you’re using a third-party videographer, it’s relatively simple to encode your video into a streaming format—just another export option from the software video editor. However, you probably don’t have the expertise to choose a codec (H.264, VP6, or VC-1), select a player (Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media, or Silverlight), or specify general encoding parameters such as resolution, data rate, or frame rate, not to mention advanced parameters such as variable bitrate encoding, B-frame interface, and CABAC versus CAVLC.
Depending upon your choice of technologies, you may have to create a player (Flash or Silverlight), which will likely require programming resources, and you’ll have to create the HTML links to embed the video into your webpage. None of this stuff is rocket science, but it will either take time, money, or both to acquire this knowledge and expertise. And all of these tasks will be fully assumed by any of the companies available in the second and third categories. So unless you’re a streaming guru or you play one on TV, hosting your own videos isn’t free.
In addition, consider what you’re giving up by hosting your own videos. At a very high level, UGC sites deliver two benefits: content delivery and community. UGC sites are in charge of making sure that your video gets delivered to your target viewers at sufficient bitrates that ensure high-quality viewing, and they are almost certainly better equipped to handle that than your web-hosting provider or your own self-hosted site. Beyond that, UGC sites, if chosen correctly, can deliver community or, if you prefer, viewers, which is critical if your videos are designed to market your products and services.
The Advantages of UGC Sites
UGC sites deliver additional viewers in several ways. First, sites such as YouTube have morphed into ad hoc Yellow Pages for viewers searching for any number of things. If you’re unconvinced, I have an excellent example. If you had a potential medical malpractice claim in New York, where would you go to find a lawyer? A phone book? The bar association? That’s where I would look. But if you search for “medical malpractice New York” on YouTube, you’ll find a video from an attorney that was uploaded in July 2008. The video had been viewed 61,693 times when I wrote this article—obviously, it will have been viewed many more times by the time you read this (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Think that YouTube is a waste of time? With 61,693 views in a matter of 7 months, attorney Robert Sullivan might disagree.
Read Entire Article at Streaming Media
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