Archives de catégorie : Video Marketing

Fusillade dans l’État de Washington: le tireur présumé arrêté

Video Marketing,

«Le tireur a été capturé ce soir par les autorités», a indiqué sur Twitter le porte-parole de la police de l’État de Washington, Mark Francis.

Quatre femmes et un homme ont péri dans cette fusillade survenue vendredi soir au Cascade Mall de Burlington, une commune de quelques milliers d’habitants à 110 km au nord de Seattle. Le tireur a ouvert le feu au rayon maquillage d’un grand magasin de l’enseigne Macy’s.

Le FBI, la police fédérale, avait fait savoir qu’il n’y avait à ce stade aucun indice «d’acte terroriste». Les enquêteurs ont diffusé des images du suspect et sollicité l’aide de la population pour l’arrêter.

Une arme a été retrouvée, mais le suspect, brun et vêtu d’un t-shirt et d’un short noirs sur ces clichés de vidéo-surveillance, avait pris la fuite.

«J’ignore à ce stade quelles étaient ses motivations», a dit Chris Cammock, lieutenant de police de la ville voisine de Mount Vernon, précisant lors d’une conférence de presse que cet homme semblait être arrivé seul au centre commercial.

Un premier bilan avait fait état de quatre personnes tuées, quatre femmes, mais un homme transporté à l’hôpital dans un état critique a succombé à ses blessures, avait indiqué Mark Francis.

«C’est un acte insensé», s’est ému le maire de la ville Steve Sexton, exprimant son désarroi de voir sa commune touchée par l’une de ces fusillades qui se produisent fréquemment aux États-Unis, où les armes sont faciles d’accès et leur port autorisé par le Deuxième amendement de la Constitution.

«Des tirs et des tirs»

Alertée par des appels à 18 h 58 vendredi, la police est intervenue rapidement et le centre commercial a été évacué. La police a quadrillé les lieux et des médecins sont intervenus sur place.

D’après le sergent Francis, le suspect a été vu en train de se diriger à pied vers une autoroute qui passe à proximité du centre commercial situé à Burlington, une ville entre Seattle et la frontière canadienne.

Les services de secours ont pénétré dans le Cascade Mall «sous escorte», après que la police a donné son feu vert, pour soigner les blessés, a-t-il précisé.

«J’ai entendu un tir (…) puis trois autres personnes ont commencé à courir, et ensuite il y a eu des tirs et des tirs», a raconté à la chaîne Armando Patino, salarié dans une boutique de téléphonie.

«Je suis retourné dans ma boutique. Certaines personnes ne savaient pas où aller, je les ai fait entrer dans la boutique», a-t-il ajouté.

Le débat sur les armes a été particulièrement ravivé récemment aux États-Unis par les attentats d’Orlando (Floride, 49 morts en juin) et de San Bernardino (Californie) en décembre 2015 –un couple avait tué 14 personnes–, mais sans avancées notables. Dans ces deux derniers cas, les tueurs avaient agi au nom du groupe État islamique.

The Batman of Tech – CMO by day, rock star by night

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Meet Reid Genauer, the chief marketing officer of video app Magisto, and the lead singer/ of the Assembly of Dust band.

LOS ANGELES – If you were to call Reid Genauer a real rock star of a chief marketing officer, you wouldn’t be exaggerating.

Genauer is a tech marketer by day for the video editing app Magisto–but he often spends weekends, with guitar in hand, in front of large crowds at clubs, performing with his band, Assembly of Dust.

“I do this because music is a part of my DNA,” says Genauer, Magisto’s chief marketing officer, our guest on the extended weekend edition of the #TalkingTech podcast. “I can’t imagine life without it. It’s all I ever wanted to do, and I chased it with all of my being.”

But once his first band Strangefolk became successful enough to tour 120 dates a year, his feelings about the working musician’s life turned south. Going from gig to gig, town to town, made him feel “unhinged,” like he was living a truck driver’s life, not that of an artist.

So on a lark he applied to Cornell for an MBA change of life, and a few years later was working as a product manager at Snapple.

Now he’s all about getting Magisto into the hands of more consumers and businesses.

« I don’t know how he does it, » says longtime friend Jim Louderback, editorial director for the VidCon online video convention. « Very few people could do both gigs well. Reid just has a tremendous amount of energy and is great at focusing. »

Magisto CEO Oren Boiman says having Genauer on the team gives him a different perspective of consumers than he’d get with a traditional marketing exec.

“He gets a feeling for what moves them,” he says. “Our business is about people and their emotional reactions and memories,” and having the creative type on staff is a good counter-balance to the hard-core science, he adds. “A lot of our innovations come from the marriage of the two.”

His bands were never household names, but Genauer sells enough tickets to get consistent bookings, and has become well known on the folk-rock and jam band scene. He’s opened for Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh and Bob Weir at solo shows. Singing the Dead’s « Friend of the Devil » to assembled Deadheads was a career high, he notes.

Mike Vorhaus, an analyst with Magid Associates, knows Genauer both as a music fan, and as from industry conferences.

« I have watched Reid play and sing and I have watched him wine and dine digital titans, » he says. « I doubt (the late Dead guitarist) Jerry Garcia could have done both. »

Magisto has over 80 million registered users, and looks to all those folks making videos on their smartphones that never get around to doing anything with their images.

The app, which is free, automatically creates mini-videos, which can be shared on Facebook and YouTube. (Subscription plans start at $4.99 monthly, and remove Magisto branding from the video.)

Genauer’s audience is the “99% of the world that never considers video editing,” he says. “Our greatest competitor is apathy. But as you see more video in your social feed, the expectation of what’s possible increases, people start to say, `How did Aaron do that?’”

Usage of the app is being driven by millennials, he says. “They are mobile first and social first. It’s hard to read a long article on your phone, but you can watch a video very easily.”

Genauer, who grew up in New York State, now lives in the Silicon Valley, where Magisto is based. But the audiences for the group–both Assembly of Dust and Strangefolk, which still plays occasionally, are primarily on the east coast. The alt-country folk group Dust recently did gigs in Washington, DC, Philadelphia and New York, and will appear in Portland, Maine and Vermont in November.

Dust will perform 25 dates in 2016.

A Google search of Genauer pops up with a band reference first, followed by his corporate LinkedIn persona.

How does he lead the dual life?

“I work like a snake eats,” he says. “I go through intense hyper productive periods, and then I crash.”

Once he switched to business, he couldn’t leave music behind, he says.

“I like wearing the same shoes I did when I was 14,” he says. “I like cursing, I like my hair a mess. The music part of my persona I carry with me wherever I go.”

Beyond that, music is “an outlet for thoughts and emotions,” he says, and performing is “like having a magic wand. You can change people’s state of minds….Having 200 people sing your songs back to you–there’s just nothing like it. » On the flip side, working for a video editing app, and « watching videos of people telling their life story in Japan, and India and Chicago all in the same day –that’s quite magical. »

Being in the business world is also creative, he says. “You’re building a new product out of thin air and problem-solving in ways that haven’t been addressed before.”

That, and, he adds, “compared to being a musician,” working for a tech-startup “is very stable. That’s ironic, but true.”

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Reid Genauer performs his composition « Speculator » in the USA TODAY Los Angeles bureau, accompanied by Jefferson Graham on guitar

Stick with the podcast all the way through to hear Genauer perform his composition “Speculator,” accompanied by the host, and follow USA TODAY’s Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham. The extended weekend edition of #TalkingTech runs every Saturday; listen to the daily and weekend editions on Stitcher and iTunes. 

Microsoft’s Aggressive Marketing of The Xbox One And Against Sony Is Their Best Bet Going Forward

Video Marketing,

In 2013, Sony won the console war for this generation before either the Xbox One or the PlayStation 4 had even launched. This was done not by some incredible killer app game shown off that was exclusive to the PS4, or by some killer feature that instantly caught everyone’s attention- no, it was done by Sony’s extremely savvy marketing, which managed to paint the PS4 as a powerful, simple, gamer first and gamer friendly console, with no nonsense and gimmicks attached.

The real coupe de grace for Sony came, however, thanks to Microsoft’s incessant mess ups at the time- Microsoft unveiled a machine that was more expensive than the PS4, less powerful, straddled with a gimmick that no one wanted or cared for, and riddled with anti consumer, hostile policies that made something as simple as game ownership a convoluted affair. Sony sprung on that last bit, in particular, making it a point to contrast their own gamer friendly approach to Microsoft’s in their messaging and marketing for the PS4- and in the process, they indelibly painted themselves as the pro-gamer alternative to Microsoft’s greedy, profit seeking establishment machine.

This was the perception that their marketing created, and this is the perception that stuck, and even continues to stick- in spite of all of Microsoft’s work over the last three years to undo the damage done in that one instance, popular perception still continues to work against them, anecdotally speaking. It is one of the many reasons Microsoft are going for a reset with the Xbox One S and the Xbox One Scorpio- a taint on your brand can be hard to shake off, and by that point, it’s best to just rebrand entirely (just ask Sony with the PS3, and the subsequent PS3 Slim rebranding).

Xbox One S

« Aggressive marketing that directly calls out the competition is not even a new tactic. »

This image that stuck for Sony and for Microsoft came entirely because of Sony’s aggressive marketing and messaging, that wasn’t afraid to call out the competition when the competition slipped up. Seeing Sony (rightly) call Microsoft out on their bullshit – and seeing Microsoft being unable to respond, because what Sony was saying was true after all – ultimately convinced everyone about where they should put their money (it even ended up being a net win for Microsoft and Xbox fans, who ended up getting a far better product than they would have otherwise, thanks to Microsoft working extra hard to win everybody back).

Aggressive marketing that directly calls out the competition is not even a new tactic – Apple has directly called out Microsoft and Windows PCs in its Mac advertisements before, Coke and Pepsi trade blows with each other openly, and even in the world of video games, Sega and Nintendo used to openly exchange barbs with each other back in the 16-bit heyday of gaming- anyone remember ‘Genesis does what Nintendon’t?’ Or Nintendo of America’s Howard Lincoln’s legendary press release aimed directly at Sega? Or Sony themselves directly targeting Sega and Nintendo with their first batch of PlayStation ads?

Video game ads used to be aggressive, and directly contrasted a product with the competition- in terms of features, games, power, or just the coolness factor. But some time down the line, all that stopped, and video game marketing became mostly neutered and safe. Shots at the competition were veiled, and never in any marketing facing the mainstream. It took Sony taking aim at Microsoft and the Xbox One to revive this old tradition.

Which brings us to Microsoft- in the last few weeks, Sony have slipped up a fair bit. The PS4 Pro, for instance, is a decidedly weaker product than the upcoming Xbox One Scorpio. And for a console being pushed for its 4K capabilities, it misses a vital feature by being incapable of paying 4K UHD Blu Ray discs (where even the Xbox One S can do that). Sony have raised the price of the PS Plus by $10 with no justification given, where PSN as a network continues to consistently lag behind Xbox Live, and they recently blocked mods for Fallout 4 from appearing on the PS4, making the PS4 the only platform that does not support mods for the game, and making this just one more instance of Sony arbitrarily blocking something for the players (previously, they’ve blocked EA Access, and cross platform online play).

15 Ways to Enhance Your Experience on PS4 and Xbox One

« No one should be complaining about this- Microsoft fans get to tout areas where their system is superior, and Sony fans hopefully get a better product and more responsive company at the end of this all. »

Microsoft decided to do something new here- they decided to call Sony out on this. From tweets specifically pointing out that their console could play 4K Blu Ray discs (and Fallout 4 mods), to press releases and statements very carefully noting that the Scorpio would be a more powerful console than the PS4 Pro, Microsoft made sure to call attention to the difference between themselves and Sony at the moment- because that difference works in their favor.

There are people who are actually a fair bit offended by Microsoft here, which is a) hypocritical, because where were they when Sony released that used games video back in 2013?, and b) short sighted, because in the long run, Microsoft directly calling Sony out when Sony slip up will create enough discontent with Sony that they will be forced to address areas they are lacking in and directly improve as a result- it happened with Microsoft earlier this generation, and with Nintendo with the 3DS, and with Sony with the PS3. No one should be complaining about this- Microsoft fans get to tout areas where their system is superior, and Sony fans hopefully get a better product and more responsive company at the end of this all. So I personally think that Microsoft doing what they are doing is great.

This is a move that makes sense for Microsoft, too. They are currently selling a console that has been outsold by the competition 2:1, and which has far more cachet with the audience and with third party developers than they do- in other words, they literally have their backs to the wall. In a case such as this, standing out with an aggressive marketing strategy cannot hurt them at all.

The fact that this marketing strategy is predicated on facts, and no FUD or marketing buzzwords, is what makes it all even better. Microsoft are now, perhaps tired of not being given due credit by a gaming public that is at its worst antipathetic, and at best, apathetic, tooting their own horn, and calling attention to themselves where they are doing better than Sony. In the process, they are highlighting that Sony are not infallible, that Sony are stumbling. It’s a good move for Microsoft, and it’s a good move for Sony in the long run too, who will be forced to improve. Most of all, it is good news for the gaming industry, and for us, as gamers, because with two competitive products in the market, it will be us who benefit the most in the long run.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Digital Video is Killing TV? Six Reasons That’s Crazy Talk

Video Marketing,

It’s obvious why. Because of its high engagement and consumers’ natural attraction to sight, sound and motion, video will always be a great choice for entertaining, engaging and creating a strong brand experience. And the targeting capabilities of digital video platforms make it simple and cost-efficient for advertisers and their agencies to get these messages in front of the right people at the right time. (That is, when a digital video ad isn’t being served by or to a botnet, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

ONLINE VIDEO ROUND UP: Pongalo, Ooyala, Twitter and More… – Portada

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sports-video

Gretchen Gardner @gardnergretchen | 09/22/2016

A summary of the most exciting recent news in online video and ad tech in the US, US-Hispanic and Latin American markets. If you’re trying to keep up, consider this your one-stop shop.

US/US-HISPANIC MARKET

ATT has announced the launch of an online streaming video service, DirecTV Now, with more than 100 premium channels.

AppsFlyer has upgraded its Active Fraud Suite, a brand new technology called DeviceRank, which it describes as « the world’s first solution to identify mobile fraud at the device-level » that will deliver « 3x to 12x stronger performance than industry standard anti-fraud solutions such as IP filtering and distribution modeling. » It is now enabled for all AppsFlyer customers.

Ooyala has published its Q2 2016 Global Video Index featuring insights from more than 3.5 billion video analytic events per day from 220 million viewers across the world.This quarter, the report focused on ‘power users’: « customers who visited on more days each month — at least seven days per month but typically many more — and made more frequent visits each day than an average customer. » Among other insight, the report claims that on an AVoD news site users visit 37 per cent more during the workweek than on weekends and use computers to consume content for longer periods, compared to the average user who uses a mobile phone.

Get ready for the 2017 Online Video Marketing Guide to be published on October 25, 2016 with the latest stats/projections and intelligence on the Ad-Driven Online Video market (OTT) throughout the Americas. To align your brand with this important annual reference and thought leadership report, please contact Portada’s Sales and Marketing Director Kelley Eberhardt at kelley@portada-online.com.

Apple Inc. and Google made changes to their mobile web browsers to enable video content to play automatically in web pages, provided audio is muted. The adjustment may result in more mobile video consumption, driving new revenue.

Click here to watch Tubular Insight‘s new webinar: « The State of Online Video 2016. »

Josh McFarland, Twitter’s vice president of product, spoke at DMEXCO marketing conference in Cologne, Germany, and presented the following stats on Twitter and video: 93 percent of Twitter videos are watched on a mobile device. In Europe, almost half of people use Twitter while watching TV. He also said that tweets with video are 6x more likely to go viral, and tweets with a photo are 3x more likely than tweets with an animated GIF to go viral.

anatomyAnatomy Media released a report about millennials claiming that two-thirds of millennials use an ad blocker on a desktop or mobile device, and that about 36% block pre-roll ads on short-form videos; and 28% do so for long-form content such as a TV series.
Furthermore, 61% of millennials who stream content used a shared password or cable log-in.

LATAM MARKET

Mexico’s Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) claims that more than eight in ten Mexican teenagers (between 13-17) come across advertising while watching or downloading videos, films or TV programs, as well as while using mobiles apps. 52% say that brands are important. Music videos are the preferred content to consume online (64% of teenagers do this), followed by concerts (46%), films (44%) and TV series (35%).

The Mexico City Tourism Trust (Fondo Mixto de Promoción Turística del Distrito Federal) has partnered with Marko and Alex Ayling, known online as The Vagabrothers, to develop a four-part video series, launching today, to introduce their millennial audience to Mexico City’s charm in ways that appeal directly to their interests.

In Peru, TV consumption habits are changing as online video surges. A study by Nielsen claims that 72% of Peruvians are watching online video through subscription platforms. 72% have cable, 13% have satellite cable, and 13% have an account with an online video provider. But only 24% implied that they would exchange their current provider for a VOD platform.

PORTADA RESEARCH: Hispanic Online Video Ad Market to Soar to US $450 million. In a new report Portada estimates that the Hispanic Online Video Ad market volume will climb to US $450 million by 2020. Particularly high growth is to be expected by branded content videos. Among video ad-tipes, in-stream will continue to have the largest share, although out-stream will grow at a higher rate.

Latin Everywhere has announced a partnership with Telefónica to offer the mobile carrier’s LatAm customers Pongalo, a content streaming service with a library of more than 50,000 hours of telenovelas and other content.

tipalti_logo_final-nobackgroundAutomized payment provider Tipalti has announced that it is expanding its services to better aid companies in validating tax ID numbers of its providers in Argentina and Brazil. This way, companies can work with providers and partners in these countries to guarantee tax compliance through registering the beneficiaries’ tax information and reduce fraud.

Endemol has sold its Argentine affiliate to its local partner, Martín Kweller, who has been a minority shareholder until now. The company’s name will be changed to Kuarzo Endemic Argentina. 

Gretchen Gardner @gardnergretchen
09/22/2016
– 6 things to know, Video Marketing
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Gretchen Gardner @gardnergretchen

Moving Beyond Flash: The Yahoo HTML5 Video Player – Streaming …

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Adobe Flash, once the de-facto standard for media playback on the web, has lost favor in the industry due to increasing concerns over security and performance. At the same time, requiring a plugin for video playback in browsers is losing favor among users as well. As a result, the industry is moving toward HTML5 for video playback.

HTML5 video playback development is still nascent, and it was initially supported by browsers in its simplest form. Only recently has support been expanded to include capabilities for adaptive streaming. Adaptive streaming offers two key benefits:

  • Adaptive Bitrate (ABR): An algorithm that detects a user’s bandwidth, CPU capacity, player size, etc. in real time and accordingly adjusts the bits downloaded to stream video.
  • Variable buffer sizing: A capability that allows us to control the time it takes for the playback to start.

Without ABR and variable buffer sizing, users have a poor viewing experience, as video playback cannot adapt to changing conditions on a user’s device.

These new capabilities have enabled a shift in the video-streaming industry from Flash to HTML5 and JavaScript.

At Yahoo, our video player uses HTML5 across all modern browsers for video playback. In this post we will describe our journey to providing an industry-leading playback experience using HTML5, lay out some of the challenges we faced, and discuss opportunities we see going forward.

The First Steps Toward HTML5

We took the first step in our HTML5 journey in October 2015 when we globally live-streamed a regular season NFL game for the first time. For the event, we deployed a « pure » HTML5 player on Safari; this was based on the native HTML5 support in the browser for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). As part of that effort, we built the capabilities in our video player to allow different video rendering techniques based on the client environment (viz. browser, Flash support, device configuration, OS, etc.).

Architecture Decision

In order to broadly support HTML5 video on all browsers, we needed to re-architect the way our player streamed video. This presented a number of choices, all of which could impact Yahoo’s business and the user experience.

The first and probably most critical was to determine the streaming protocol to support. The choice was between HLS and DASH, both of which support Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. However, in order to maintain a simple serving stack and get to market quickly, we decided to support HLS. To support iOS, we would have needed to support HLS anyway, and as the standards evolved, Media Source Extensions (MSE) could be made to work with HLS. MSE is a recent advancement to HTML5 standards that allows the dynamic generation of media streams for playback via the video tag.

Our next decision was whether to build, buy, or leverage open source for an HTML5 player. Yahoo was not alone in its desire for an HTML5-based player, and a number of open source options existed. Leveraging one of these players would jump-start our effort. However, analysis, including field tests of the in-market players, confirmed that the available players would not provide the quality, performance, and scale that we expected out of the Yahoo Video Player.

Finally, our existing video player, which supported Flash, was mature and battle tested. We needed to decide whether to port the design and logic from Flash to JavaScript, or rebuild and redesign our player. We chose the latter. In doing so, we were able to address several new design goals, including making it extensible to support DASH at a later stage. This decision allowed us to avoid inheriting the Flash-specific drawbacks of the previous design.

As you will see below, all of the design decisions provided us great benefits.

Zooming into the Future

With decisions determined, we set out to write a player that would remove our dependency on Flash to play video. The project was codenamed « Zoom, » after the arch-nemesis of DC Comics’ superhero, the Flash.

The media pipeline of the player for HLS streaming would look as depicted in Figure 1 below. The player demuxes the incoming transport stream (MPEG-TS) into audio and video parts that are then packaged into the fragmented MP4 format that is understood by the MSE layer in the browser.

Figure 1. Media pipeline for HTML5 content

We designed the new HTML5 player with a few goals in mind. It was to be the following:

  • Modular: Each component could evolve separately and could be tested independently.
  • Extensible: The new player would have the ability to support new features (e.g., DASH) without a redesign.
  • Stateless: We would use components (like ABR) across multiple player instances on a page or app.

Figure 2 below shows the high-level architecture of the new HTML5 MSE-based video player.

Figure 2. Architecture of Yahoo HTML5 Player

Framework Services provide common capabilities like HTTP Loader (for loading video assets), Web Workers (for multithreading), and Bandwidth Estimator.

Stream Media Services include services that deal with the various stages of the media pipeline shown above. This includes loading the transport stream, demuxing and packaging into MP4 that can be played using MSE.

Streaming Controller is the component that manages the video content streaming. It is also the component that consults with the ABR Engine to decide the right bitrate to download.

Playback Controller is the component that orchestrates the video playback using the various modules. It maintains a state machine of the various states the playback can be in. It also provides the APIs to play, pause, seek, etc.

Challenges

First, we were moving from a single framework (Adobe Flash), which provided a consistent environment across browsers, to multiple frameworks (MSE, XHR, Web Workers, HTML5 Media Elements) on diverse platforms and browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Safari, etc.), each of which added its own quirks to the system.

The second challenge involved advertising. While content video playback has shifted to HTML5, most video advertisers continue to rely on Flash. As such, we had to find a seamless way to serve ad content on Flash while leveraging HTML5 for content playback. We built our player to use different renderers—the component that uses a given rendering technique (Flash, HTML5, etc.) for video playback—while maintaining a seamless experience. This allowed us to give users the optimal experience while protecting ad revenue.

The third challenge was finding ways to increase user engagement, a key metric for the success of video consumption. We wanted users to engage with video continuously without any action that required their initiation, like a click or additional page load. And, at the same time we did not want the experiences (e.g., the page) to implement continuous playback on a per-experience basis. Hence, we decided to make « playlists » a first-class API on the video player itself, where we could program a curated list of videos that are highly contextual and personalized.

Figure 3 below shows the high-level architecture of the Yahoo Video Player.

Figure 3. Architecture of Yahoo Video Player

Controller is the component that manages the switching of renderer and exposes the various playback functions.

Ads Controller is used to manage and play video advertisements.

Playlist Manager manages the playing of a video playlist and exposes the playlist functions.

Performance (viz rebuffering and startup time) is a key driver for user engagement. Making performance-related changes raised a number of obstacles.

Audio/video demultiplexing and MP4 packaging are CPU-intensive operations. If these operations are performed in the main UI thread of the browser, it affects the UI responsiveness of the page and the player. Fortunately, browsers provide Web Workers to facilitate multi-threading, but using them requires message passing between threads.

Our experiments revealed that using a worker for demuxing and MP4 packaging was 20% more efficient in Firefox (vs. not using a Web Worker). On the other hand, we discovered that the overhead of inter-thread message passing is high in IE and Edge, resulting in a higher re-buffering ratio. To overcome these challenges, we added two new design elements:

  • Execute processing units inside a worker
  • Minimize inter-thread messages

The effective use of Web Workers for media transformation gives the Yahoo HTML5 player a distinctive performance edge over other players. These enhancements resulted in a 10% – 20% improvement in CPU and 30% improvement in re-buffering ratio.

Opportunities

While we faced a number of challenges, building a redesigned player in-house gave us the opportunity to introduce features that were not supported in the previous player.

Since we built the capability of switching renderers to support ads using Flash and to support content using HTML5, we were able to build pre-loading capabilities. That is, we can preload the next item in the playlist before it is actually played. For example, once an ad is loaded and starts to play, we can preload the content in the background, thus making for a TV-like transition between ads and content.

We also improved our bandwidth estimation algorithm. Previously, it was purely based on timing the rate of content download. We augmented it with the information we get from the resource timing APIs like TTFB (Time To First Byte).

We also introduced a feature that enabled us to switch bitrates at key frame boundaries. This improves our ability to react to sudden changes in network conditions.

Results

We started the rollout of the new HTML5 player on Google Chrome and have been adding support for more browsers over time. We now have the new HTML5 player running on all modern browsers. Figure 4 below shows video views based on which renderer is used for playback. We use HTML5-based rendering for approximately 70% of our desktop traffic now. This number is set to increase as we complete the roll out of our player across the complete Yahoo network. The most prominent platform that does not support MSE is IE on Windows 7, which will continue to be served via Flash.

Figure 4. Video views based on renderer used

On the important quality metric of rebuffering ratio, the HTML5 player is trending at par or better than our Flash player (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Rebuffering ratio – Flash vs. HTML5

The HTML5 player excels over the Flash player when it comes to the video start time once the user input to play is received. Figure 6 shows the latency between the user click and the rendering of the first frame of the video (Click To Play Latency) of the Flash and HTML5 based players.

Figure 6. Click To Play Latency – Flash vs. HTML5

Advantages of the HTML5 player such as faster load time, better efficiency, etc. are well-reflected in these results.

The Road Ahead

Adaptive streaming on the internet is rapidly evolving. While the industry is improving the playback experience in the context of a single player, at Yahoo, we are also optimizing for video streaming performance of multiple videos on the same page. We are also working to bring our MSE-based HTML5 player to mobile web.

Apple recently announced support for fragmented MP4 as a transport stream in HLS, a decision that aligns well with our strategy to stick with HLS. This gives us three wins:

  • Simplifying the player since fragmented MP4 is natively compatible to MSE.
  • Improving the player performance by avoiding the CPU-intensive demuxing and MP4 packaging steps.
  • Reducing the bandwidth usage for similar content and consequently improve playback quality and startup times.

We remain focused on advancing the state of the art of video streaming on the internet, and we’re hiring! Email me at amitnj@yahoo-inc.com and we can talk about opportunities on our team.

The Future of Marketing Lies with YouTube & Facebook Video

Video Marketing, , , ,

The folks at HubSpot, an inbound marketing and sales platform, have just published their eighth annual State of Inbound Report. And the big news is buried on Page 44 of the 65-page long report: Inbound marketers see YouTube and Facebook video as the future of marketing! And this future also includes Instagram, Snapchat, and Vine!

Now, most video marketers will shrug their shoulders and say, “We’ve known that video is the future of marketing for years.” But, take a closer look and who HubSpot surveyed. They are marketers in B2B, B2C, small, and mid-sized businesses. Half of the companies represented generate under $1 million each year. And HubSpot was able to get 4,500 respondents from over 132 countries. So, this is a big freaking deal.

Video Content Marketing

If video marketers aren’t familiar with the concept of inbound marketing, it’s a term that was coined back in 2005 by Brian Halligan, the CEO and co-founder of HubSpot. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, Halligan says inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product. The concept started with blogging, which is why one of the questions that the 2016 State of Inbound Report asks is: “How long does it typically take you or someone in marketing to write a 500-word blog post?” (The answers range from under 1 hour to over 4 hours. More significantly, only 42% of blog posts are 500 words or less long. Another 42% are 501 to 1,000 words long. And some are 1,001 to 1,500 words long or longer.)

Unlike most YouTube creators or media companies, inbound marketers aren’t trying to build a large consumer audience that will be monetized by selling advertising to brands and agencies. According to HubSpot, inbound marketers are more likely to work for small businesses or B2B companies that deal with high dollar values, long research cycles and knowledge-based products. They are more interested in aligning the content they publish with their customer’s interests, attracting inbound traffic naturally that they can then convert, close, and delight over time.

And while inbound marketers may be late to the digital video dance, they have a very clear picture of what the future of marketing will look like. HubSpot asked them, “What content distribution channels do you plan to add to your marketing efforts in the next 12 months?” And 48% said YouTube, 39% said Facebook video, 33% said Instagram, 20% said messaging apps, 15% said podcasts, 13% said Snapchat, 8% said Medium, 5% said Slack, 5% said Vine, and 5% said other.

hubspot-graphic

hubspot-graphic

According to the report, the biggest takeaway, is this: “Marketers are thinking hard about decentralized content. Many are experimenting with taking their content to new channels; this is a fairly new tactic that few have mastered, but many are working on.

In our survey, marketers clearly are accounting for video content’s rising popularity among global online browsers, with 48% planning on using YouTube and 39% looking to use Facebook video.

With such a large number of respondents, HubSpot can drill down into data and still get an accurate picture of what different segments think about the future of marketing. For example, inbound marketers in North America (NAM) are the least enthusiastic about video content, with only 35% saying they’ll use YouTube as a channel and 28% saying they’ll use Facebook video. By comparison, 56% of their counterparts Latin America (LATAM) say they’ll use YouTube and 50% say they’ll use Facebook video. When it come plans on leveraging YouTube and Facebook video in the future, inbound marketers in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), Southeast Asia (SEA), and Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) are somewhere in between.

Slicing the data another way, HubSpot reports that video dominates the agenda of C-level business leaders. By far, senior executives are embracing video content for their business, with 56% of C-levels planning to add YouTube as a content channel, 46% thinking about Facebook video, and 17% looking into Snapchat. It’s worth noting that YouTube and Facebook have spotted this trend in the digital video marketing business. Ironically, both video platforms have recently launched traditional outbound marketing efforts to reach innovative inbound marketers. (Double facepalm.)

For example, YouTube acquired Directr, a video editing startup, back in August 2014. The Directr for Business app was tailor made for marketers in small and mid-sized businesses with an iPhone. Among other things, the app featured a storyboard-driven creation process that provided novice video marketing teams the ideas, guidance, and tools they needed to create great HD videos with just their iPhones and share them instantly to their websites, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Directr for Business included storyboards for:

  • Customer testimonials,
  • Product announcements,
  • How to tutorials,
  • Executive profile videos,
  • Event videos,
  • Social media tips, and
  • Press release supplements.

In June 2016, the Official YouTube Blog announced the launch of the YouTube Director suite of products. Although it is now spelled with “o”, YouTube Director for Business still provides shot-by-shot guidance – so inbound marketers can create a high-quality video ad for their business without needing extensive video editing experience. They can browse through more than 100 video templates designed for businesses like the five in this video, who YouTube challenged to create a video ad in 20 minutes or less.

The folks at YouTube also announced YouTube Director onsite, a service that will send a professional filmmaker to shoot and edit a video ad for free whenever a business spends at least $150 to advertise on YouTube. Currently, YouTube Director onsite is only available in six metro areas. But, it’s expected to roll out in more cities soon. Now, I’m not going to knock the app. It’s free. And it solves a real problem that faces many marketers in small and mid-sized businesses who are making a video for the first time. And I’ve got no problem with YouTube Director onsite. Requiring small and mid-sized businesses to spend $150 to advertise on YouTube seems very reasonable to me.

But, let me ask video marketers a couple of basic questions. First, “Did you know that the YouTube Director for Business app was available for the iPhone in the U.S. and Canada?” Second, “Were you aware that the YouTube Director onsite service is available in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.?” I’ll bet that most of you didn’t.

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with YouTube’s product or service. But, inbound marketers will be the first to tell you that one blog post does not constitute an inbound marketing campaign – even a blog post with an embedded video and a link to an associated web page. And the examples in the embedded video above seem fine – if you’re a business that’s already interested in buying a video ad. But, they don’t really resonate with inbound marketers who are planning to create quality content that pulls people toward their company and product.

Heck, the video above shows five businesses running that are using TrueView video ads to reach a local audience and increase awareness. Now, that’s a legitimate marketing goal. But, not one of these businesses seems interested in adding interactive elements – like cards, call-to-action overlays, shopping cards, and auto end screens – that could help them achieve other advertising goals, such as driving consideration, favorability, purchase intent, and sales. Hey, these are legitimate marketing goals, too.

Facebook Video Marketing

Meanwhile, the folks over at Facebook are also working to help marketers in B2B, B2C, small, and mid-sized businesses small businesses create video ads. For example, the social network launched slideshow, a new type of lightweight video ad created from a series of still images, in October 2015. Slideshow uses video-like motion and no sound, giving inbound marketers a new way to tell their stories to people around the world. This solves two problems.

facebook-slideshow

facebook-slideshow

First, the Slideshow tool makes it a lot easier to create video ads from still images. All marketers in small and mid-sized businesses need to do is upload three to seven still images – which can come from an existing video, a photo shoot, or even stock imagery from Facebook’s library. Then, they simply choose the length of their slideshow – which can be 5 to 15 seconds long. In other words, slideshow reduces the investment required to shoot and edit a video as well as the need for video production time and resources.

Second, a 15-second slideshow can be up to 5x smaller in file size than a video of the same length. This is especially important for inbound marketers are trying to reach people in emerging and high-growth countries, where connectivity and the prevalence of basic devices make it difficult to deliver video to their entire audience.

In August 2016, Facebook announced some new features for slideshow ads. This included the ability to add text and music, create slideshows from Android mobile devices, and use assets from Facebook’s stock image database and Pages Photo Library. In addition, Facebook launched a new tool that allows inbound marketers in emerging and high growth markets to take existing video assets and turn them into a slideshow that will play on slower connection speeds – in just a few clicks.

Were you already aware of this? Or, did you miss this news about advertising on Facebook? In other words, there’s nothing wrong with Facebook’s tool. But, inbound marketers will be the first to tell you that two posts on Facebook Pages don’t constitute an inbound marketing campaign – even these posts include images, videos, and links to related Facebook Pages. And the examples of companies using slideshow in posts include Coca-Cola in Kenya and Nigeria as well as Unilever’s Paddle Pop ice cream brand in Indonesia. Now, these are both great brands, but I wouldn’t describe them as small or mid-sized businesses.

So, if you work at a brand or agency that’s already interested in buying a video ad, then you might have stumbled over the news. But, if you’re and inbound marketer who is planning to create quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, you probably missed these announcements.

And, even if you didn’t miss these announcements, neither on mentions the fact that you can track website conversions – including checkouts, registrations, leads, key web page views, adds to cart, and purchases – after seeing your Facebook ad. All you need to do is add a snippet of code to the HTML on your website, and you’ll get reports when people see your ad and take action.

Why haven’t YouTube and Facebook connected the dots for inbound marketers? Maybe they’re optimized to use traditional outbound marketing to sell boatloads of advertising to a few big advertisers. But, if they want to solve problems for thousands of innovative inbound marketers, then they might want to practice a little inbound marketing themselves. According to HubSpot, “Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention.” Hey, what a concept.

Video Innovation Summit: Lifting the Lid on Mobile Video Marketing

Video Marketing, , , ,

clapboard video

Mobile video marketing has seen incredible adoption and success over the last few years. Mobile has gone from an emerging trend to the norm. Mobile digital ad spend accounted for 30.5% (£2.6bn) of total digital ad spend in 2015, which is up 60% from the previous year. Video is representing an increasingly large share of mobile digital ad spend, with both demand and supply experiencing a surge and starting to achieve similar levels.

However, with greater adoption, several unique challenges have arisen: The introduction of new technologies has brought video to the forefront as a viable advertising medium not just for traditional branding advertisers looking for reach, but also advertisers seeking a direct response, as the development of creative technologies, as well as the ability to effectively measure video performance continue to flourish.

To combat industry challenges and maximise engagement with consumers, native advertising formats have also seen an increase – these are formats which lend themselves well to the video medium, as their ability to blend seamlessly into their surrounding environments makes them engaging and attractive for both advertisers and publishers.

Despite growth in mobile video spend from direct response advertisers, the difficulty of converting on mobile does also produce another host of challenges – the use of data in measurement and attribution is improving, but developments need to be made to ensure mobile video receives credit for its important role in the consumer journey.

The ability to successfully navigate through these challenges will allow mobile video marketers to continue to deliver engaging and memorable experiences to their desired audience. Mobile video is also ripe for innovation, both through the power of data and creatively, as well as a combination of the two. Advertisers are able to achieve never-before-seen creative feats, whether across a vast target audience or through one-to-one messaging. As consumers continue to adapt how they consume content through their smartphones and video becomes an increasingly popular and common form of smartphone consumption, so too does the industry evolve to be able to deliver smart strategies within a powerful advertising medium.

Join ExchangeWire, Videobeat Networks and Google, as ExchangeWire’s head of content, Lindsay Rowntree hosts a panel of experts from Videobeat Networks, Joint London, and JustEat at the 2nd Annual Video Innovation Summit. With discussion ranging from effective creative execution in mobile video to the value of data in video advertising and successful mobile video strategies, this event aims to lift the veil on mobile video marketing. The rare opportunity to hear from marketers, operations and creative experts about the future of mobile video marketing will ensure a lively and rounded discussion. The event will be followed by an evening of networking with over 150 marketing specialists from a range of industries.

The 2nd Annual Video Innovation Summit takes place on Wednesday 28th September from 18.30-21.30 in Central London – if you are keen to attend, you can register for the event here.

 

Gov. Walker announces $1,022 dividend check in online video … – KTVA.com

Video Marketing, , , ,
ANCHORAGE –

Gov. Bill Walker has announced the amount of the 2016 Alaska Permanent Fund dividend checks in a video posted online. This year’s check — $1,022.

2016 PFD Check Amount Announcement from Alaska Governor Bill Walker on Vimeo.

The video, recorded at Valley Pathways High School in Palmer, shows the governor joined by Palmer eighth-grader Shania Sommer, who helped announce last year’s dividend amount.

In late June, Walker announced his vetoes in which he cut dividends in half to, “preserve the state’s savings,” according to a press release Friday morning.

In the video address, the governor stressed the need for a fiscal plan to preserve the permanent fund dividend program for generations to come.

“Over the past two years, Alaska has lost over 80 percent of our income, resulting in an over $4 billion budget deficit,” said Walker in the press release. “While my administration presented a complete fiscal plan to the legislature last session, legislators did not pass a single component of that plan. We cannot continue on our current path without making significant changes. If we do, the dividend program will be gone in just a few short years.”

Friday’s release included the amount checks would have been if Walker had not made the cuts — $2,052.

Public Reaction

KTVA asked Alaskans to weigh-in on the PFD announcement and Walker’s decision to cap the dividend.

Anchorage resident Thomas Minelga is planning to spend his PFD on a vacation. He said he supports the cap:

“I think it’s necessary, given how much revenue the state has lost because of the crash in oil prices. It’s free money, so when people complain, oh, I’m not getting as much free money, well, you didn’t really work for it. So even the fact that you’re still getting a grand is pretty good.”

Shari Kayutak had a blunt response when asked what she thought of the plan to cap the PFD.

“I think it sucks. Once the government gets their hands on it … they’re not going to do anything good with it. If they wanted to do something good, they’d start cutting at the top but it’s always from the bottom.”

Resident Dimitri Shein said he’s planning to use the PFD to feed his children.

“I think it’s unfortunate. This is my home and if this is what it needs to make our ends meet and make sure we have vital services like schools and roads, I think its important that we do that.”

Facebook can’t run away the realities of video advertising anymore

Video Marketing, , , ,

Count down three seconds in your head. It goes fast, right?  I bet you did it the « one-hippopotamus way. » That’s actually considerably more than 3 seconds. Ask Siri to set a 3-second timer and then try to read something on the web.

Exactly, it’s barely enough time for a sentence, including this one.

A couple of years ago, Facebook apparently set 3 seconds or less as the benchmark for actual video ad engagement. A choice that, on its face, seems rational, even preferable for media planners and advertisers. 

SEE ALSO: Facebook overestimated video metrics for two years, report says

Anyone who spends under 3 seconds watching a Facebook video ad was, for the last couple of years, not factored into the social media giant’s average viewing time. 

Of course, an average that doesn’t account for the total number of viewers, whether they’re engaged or not, is probably not much of an average — a fact Facebook belatedly discovered and confessed to in a well-hidden blog post. Now, though, as ad partners stepped forward and called foul, Facebook made a more public apology, but insisted that « it did not impact billing, » which is another way of saying that everyone got what they paid for.

The measure of a view

I bet advertisers and their partners miss the good old days, when a media platform (newspapers, magazines, TVs) simply handed them audience numbers. The size of the audience dictated how much a media company could charge for inches, pages and minutes. No one could prove if people skipped the ads in print and, before the DVR, everyone ignored the fact that most of us used commercials as snack and bathroom break times.

The problem is that the explosion of social media and mobile video has led to the rise of engagement as a measure of success. YouTube does a good job of measuring video engagement. It knows when a video is playing, for how long, and if it stopped playing. They still don’t know if you left it playing and walked out of the room.

I am a little surprised that advertisers are trying to equate YouTube and Facebook video ad views. 

I am a little surprised that advertisers are trying to equate YouTube and Facebook video ad views. The interfaces and consumption styles are so different.

On YouTube, you find video and play it on a page basically devoted to that video. Facebook’s newsfeed puts everything on a sort of user-controlled assembly line. Users scroll up and down, only occasionally pausing to actively engage with a piece of content or maybe an ad. Much of what they see in the newsfeed hits their retinas for a second or two. Even if a video autoplays, they might scroll right by it. This is why so many Facebook videos feature text overlays — you can ingest a sentence much more quickly that you can understand what’s going on in a moving image.

I honestly don’t think it’s easy to know when people truly engage with video and if engagement leads to brand recognition or even action (buying a product or service), but you would think that measuring average video views would be a solved problem.

It’s clearly not. In fact, there is no system or any kind of agreement about how to measure this stuff, which basically makes Facebook the poster boy for this entire mess.

Help me understand

It bothered me that I sort of sympathized with Facebook. If no one can agree on how to measure video ad views, how can Facebook be blamed for trying to do it their own way? Another part of me, though, knew that Facebook chose a measurement system that favored their platform and its performance. Once they do factor in all those Facebook users seeing a video ad for 3 seconds or less, the Facebook video add engagement numbers are going to drop, by a lot.

I decided to turn to an expert to help me work through some of my conflicting concerns and feelings.

In my inbox was an email from Brian Shin. He’s the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, a social video measurement and activation company.  Visible Measures recently put out a report on engaged viewing times that shows, according to the company, that actual consumer attention is more important than view counts. 

Shin, who’s been in the industry for 15 years and has a business degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, seemed to have the answers. I wanted to clear up my own confusion and see if my feelings of sympathy for Facebook were ill-founded.

I was curious if you thought Facebook was trying to be fair by not counting any views below 3 seconds. After all, what can you glean in that period of time? Even on auto-play, you might see a second of a video ad.

Shin: Video viewership is like a going down a funnel. At the top of the funnel, you have viewers scrolling through their feed and the video player loads. On Facebook, before 3 seconds, those are considered ‘ad impressions.’ Progressing down the ‘funnel’ — if viewers stay long enough — that’s when the video view event is triggered. So much money now is being spent on buying video views (which is an improvement over buying just ‘ad impressions’ or buying based on CPMs – cost per thousand impressions), but there is no standardization on what constitutes a video view. Hence the need to know your Engaged Viewing Time across platforms. 

How might Facebook have better measured engagement? Should they have factored in every potential view — anyone the ad is served to whether it played or not? What would that have done to their engagement numbers?

Shin: Properties [like Facebook] do not show you the whole funnel — 

video player loads –

ad impressions –

video views –

viewing time –

video completions

— for lots of reasons including not wanting to enable dissection of their economics or traffic patterns. Facebook should have shown, at a minimum, the total video views and combined it with an objective measure of Engaged Viewing Time. The inaccuracy of ‘self-reported’ stats is why an objective measure is needed. The lack of standardization in terms of how video views are calculated is why an objective measure of time is needed that goes across YouTube, Facebook and other places selling cost-per-view (and other forms of) video advertising.  

So much money now is being spent on buying video views… but there is no standardization on what constitutes a video view.

Facebook including ad impression data (the stuff before 3 seconds) would not help. Marketers are paying for views (post-3 seconds) and they need to know the « value » of what they bought — demonstrable by viewing time. 

How much of all this is media buyers and advertisers still not understating the nature of social media video engagement — especially video advertising on these platforms? It is fundamentally different than the video on YouTube, after all, which isn’t even designed as a scroll. If you view a video on YT, you will likely see a pre-roll ad.

Shin: Much of the growth in video today is being driven by these ‘social’ experiences and we would include YouTube in that category. If you look at places like nbc.com, espn.com, etc., that’s really repurposing and monetizing TV content or ‘longer form’ video. 

But places like YT, FB, Twitter, etc., are pushing advertising that offers more user choice (option to skip or scroll, or share or repost, comment, etc.) and that is presenting both opportunities and challenges for marketers.

Marketers are embracing this idea of more interactivity and choice in video advertising (hence the now billions of dollars going into cost per view and other types of video advertising). But the constantly evolving landscape requires new measures of consumer attention (vs. just ad impressions). Attention in video would include finding all the views that you are generating across all properties and copies and sharing (what we call True Reach) and the actual time that consumers are spending with your video content (what we call Engaged Viewing Time). Provide total views + viewing time (and you know the spend) — you can better assess the value of your ad campaign.

Here’s what I glean from what Shin said. 

As long as companies like Facebook make up their own measurement strategies, there will be a fundamental inequity in video ad measurement on social media platforms and other services that include video ads. 

Standards would help, but so would more transparency from Facebook and others. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, someone needs to step in and level the playing field for everyone. 

We all agree that video is the future, so it’s time to get on board with a future that’s equitable and fair. Facebook’s mea culpa is a step in the right direction, but no matter what it might cost them in the short term, an agreement on video ad metrics will probably help them and everyone else make billions more in the future. 

In the end, I realize this was never about 3 seconds of video. It’s about math, averages, the measure of engagement and standards. Facebook simply couldn’t run away from those realities anymore — certainly not in three seconds or less.