Marketer's Lab

Speed Date - Feedroom

If you're exploring web video one of the vendors likely to show up on the radar is Feedroom.  The team at Feedroom was kind enough to spend a few minutes on the phone walking me through their application and sharing a little about their business.  One of the big things the Feedroom team was pretty excited about was the launch of their new Feedroom 4.0 platform.  The new platform has been completely re-architected and utilizes the newest infrastructure technologies.  They feel this is a huge differentiator and provides their clients a host of advantages in terms of reliability, scalability and overall product capability. 

The Feedroom client base is evenly split between media companies/publishers and enterprise organizations using the Feedroom platform for internal communications.  Feedroom recently acquired Clearstory, a digital asset management solution whose technology is now used to power those elements of the Feedroom platform.  The brief overview I saw looked great, plenty of horsepower to manage a variety of digital assets. 

Amongst their roster of clients, Feedroom has a diverse lineup including everone from the Department of Defense to Sundance Institute to ESPN.  Pricing is always tough to nail down but my takeaway was that for a very small operation Feedroom might be a little pricey, but if you have a little budget to work with and plan to do a lot with video, they have a very nice solution.  They have a nice little piece on their site that gives a feel for their overall positioning. 

Vendor Speed Date - Brightcove

Chances are good if you aren't already using video on the web in some shape or form, you're probably at least thinking about it.  Web video has gone way beyond integrating a talking head of an executive or attempting to be the next big viral thing on YouTube.  I'll be doing a lot more over the next few months on web video so stay tuned, but for now wanted to do a quick "speed date" post on one of the major vendors in the space, Brightcove.  

Brightcove provides a web video platform that allows you to create video players, manage your video assets, distribute and incorporate advertising (if you desire).  Their flagship product is Brightcove 3, basically the 3.0 version of their platform.  I won't even begin to walk through all the features (there are plenty), but there are a couple elements I found especially interesting. 

Brightcove player - The Brightcove player is widely used for much of the video content out there so you've probably seen or used the player.  It's well designed, fast and provides a solid experience.  The out-of-the-box version of the player is great in my opinion, but they also offer a number of options for customizing the player if you have specific branding elements to integrate.

Playlist - They don't make a lot of noise about this on their website or in my limited interactions with Brightcove, but the playlist/matrix that can accompany their player is simple and slick.  A non-tabbed version can be seen at this Fuse.TV site.  They offer options for customization if you'd like something more advanced like National Geographic or Discovery Channel.  It's a nice way to feature your entire library of video in an easy to navigate structure.

Advertising options - The advertising element of Brightcove isn't for everyone, but if integrating advertising into your video program is important they have a number of useful features.  First, they allow simple integration of pre, mid and post-roll spots with just a couple clicks on the admin side.  There are a variety of other controls for each specific ad, most publishers would be pleased with the number of control options.  The other advertising feature I found pretty compelling was turnkey integration with Tremor Media for those taking the ad network route with their advertising. 

I mentioned a couple of Brightcove's name clients above, they also work with clients like HBO, MTV Networks and a variety of others referenced on thier clients page.  If you don't happen to be a mega-media outlet with a massive video inventory and a big budget, Brightcove still works well for small publishers.  Their basic service, which has most of the features you get with the more expensive services, starts at about $6,000 per year.  As you go up the product stack you get more options for customization, more bandwidth and a few other goodies. 

Brightcove is probably not a fit for you if you only have a small number of videos or you're just looking to add a couple small video segments to a website.  If you have, or are planning to do more than just a few token video pieces, Brightcove would likely serve you well managing and delivering your video.  If you're doing any advertising integration, Brightcove then becomes an even greater value. 

That's it for this vendor speed date, more to come on the wild west of web video... 

Is Your AdReady?

Vendor Speed date - AdReady - Looking for an easy way to create an online campaign?  AdReady provides an application that makes it easy to create a complete online campaign.  They provide tools to do everything from developing creative all the way through to performance measurement.  Here's how it works:

Create banners - pulling from a library of over 600 banner design templates, users can customize banners to integrate your message and call to action.  Banners are made available in a host of sizes.

Create a campaign - AdReady has predefined target segments including B2B, Consumer, Education and Government categories and number of subsegments within those.  They also provide the ability to target geographically down to the state level.  Similar to PPC campaigns, users define a daily budget for each program.

Pick your publisher - Campaigns can run over Google, Yahoo, Right Media or United Media networks.  Google is selected as the default. 

Reporting - Once all the above steps are completed and the campaign is submitted, AdReady provides a suite of reports to track program performance. 

Certainly not for everyone, but for organizations looking for a quick, easy tool for creating online campaigns, AdReady is an pretty interesting solution.

 

Bubble Guru

(Vendor Speed Date - Bubble Guru)... Bubble Guru offers a solution to quickly and easily create little video "bubbles" which can be used for a variety of web applications.  They of course sprinkle examples liberally throughout their own site and feature a handful of testimonials as well.  The process looks very simple, either using a web-cam application they provide or uploading video you may have captured on your own.  They offer a free 14 day trial and have packages that range from a whopping $2.95 per month up to the advanced package for $14.95 per month. 

Not familiar with anything quite like Bubble Guru, it looks like an easy way to provide a richer web experience and if used creatively could add a lot of value to any site.      

Your Blog is Talking

First official vendor speed date post here... The vendor is Odiogo.  They provide a service that automatically creates podcasts from text on blogs or other sites.  I've posted previously on the fact podcasts are here to stay as part of the marketing mix so this technology seems like a super easy way to leverage existing web content to tap into the podcast crowd.  Odiogo has a nice demo which provides an overview of how their service works.  Prior to this post I've not tried the service myself, but am intrigued enough to explore a little more.  The automated voice is of course a little stilted and awkward, but honestly not terrible as automated voice bots go.  They look to be easily compatible with all the major blog platforms and actually offer the service for free to bloggers.  Ads (sold by Odiogo) are inserted into each podcast, but they do offer a revenue share model for bloggers at a certain traffic level.  If you have web content that you think might transition well to podcasts, certainly worth checking out Odiogo.