YouTube Live TV

YouTube's live TV expansion, which will enable marketers to reach millions of internet users worldwide through branded web TV channels and full-length ad-funded programmes, is one of the reasons why we started branding InShotTV early last year. As Goggle's InVideo ad platform opens up, so many brands are going to need a helping hand to create, script and navigate this space.

Online Video Brightcove Forecast

As video content owners and website publishers walk into 2008, we expect several major trends will shape their strategies in the Internet video market.

Branded Destinations
Nothing about the Internet changes the fundamentals of media—value is created by controlling the content or controlling access to the audience. Media companies with established brands and new start-ups will continue to build successful branded destinations so they can control the access to audiences. We expect these destinations will leverage Internet TV Platforms, Community Platforms, and Ad Platforms to compete with the major aggregators by offering consumers a more focused and differentiated experience, including exclusive content, and by giving advertisers a better environment to build their brands.

Audience Networks
Because of the power of the big aggregators to reach new audiences, content owners will continue to develop distribution strategies that place elements of their content library into wide distribution, in most cases with advertising attached. Because there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution, content owners will depend on Internet TV Platforms to help them manage the complex policy and technology challenges associated with implementing Internet distribution strategies. They will use audience networks to bridge the gap between aggregators and their own branded destinations, which will make the web as a whole a much more interesting place.

Audience Monetization
To date the advertising focus in the Internet TV market has been on monetizing video streams. But this focus is both shortsighted and not nearly as effective as thinking about how to monetize audience. By developing audience-centric strategies, content owners will look for new ways to blend ad formats, insertion policies, and targeting tactics across pages, short-form video clips, long-form shows, and open distribution. While they are more difficult to plan and execute these ad strategies deliver greater yield and a much better user experience, which means better sustainability. These strategies will also take advantage of both direct selling and integration with Uber Ad Platforms.

Contextual Publishing
One of the key insights from the last two years is that short-form online video does best when it’s placed in a context. The context could be created by pages in a website, comments from users, line-ups in a player, etc. Regardless of how it’s done, getting the context right means you can put the right video clips in front of a viewer, which makes everyone happy. We expect that contextual in-page video publishing will grow, and that it will be extended to slideshows and audio content as more and more rich media is brought out of silos and into the core of websites.

High-Quality Video
The explosive growth that has happened with the major network episode players, and the increasing access that consumers have to long form, high-quality video will push Internet TV closer to traditional broadcast TV, and widen the opportunity for brand marketers that covet the deep engagement created by a full-screen, immersive experience.

Extract by Jeremy Allaire, Founder/CEO & Adam Berrey, SVP Marketing, Brightcove

Online Video Vernacular

Below is a glossary of some online video terms frequently in use:

Alpha video
Animations that pop up on the page without affecting its other content or functionality. An alpha video can be a sponsor’s mascot or spokesperson, for instance.

In-stream advertising
Ads that run within the video content, either as a pre-roll, post-roll or mid-roll.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand)
The amount of money an advertiser pays for every 1,000 times an ad is seen on a Web page.

Mash-up tools
Editing software tools that let a user to take the video they are watching and combine that with other video or other content to form new content. For example, a user could take clips of a certain video and combine them with other video to make a new video.

Overlays/Flash overlays
Ads shown on the bottom 1/3 of the video screen consisting mostly of text with minimal graphics. The overlays can be clicked on to take the user to other content, such as a sponsor’s Web site or a full-length ad.

Post-roll
A video advertisement shown at the end of the video a user has selected to view. Typically 15 or 30 seconds in length.

Pre-roll
A video advertisement that plays before the start of a video that a user has selected to play shown prior to the user's selected content starting to play. Typically 15 or 30 seconds in length.

Pre-roll bumpers
Short pre-roll video ads or content previews shown before a user's selected content starts to play. Typically 8 seconds in length.

Product and brand integration
A video that includes identifiable products or logos embedded into a video’s content, such as a character in the video is holding a brand-name can of soft drink.

Rate card
The price list of the various forms of advertising on a particular Web site.

Reminder unit
A static ad that runs outside a video player, below a video ad from the same advertiser.

Reservation-purchase basis
An advance reservation for an ad, meaning the ad must be bought and reserved in advance.

Roadblock
Full-screen ad that usually takes over the home page of a Web site when a visitor lands there. The ads, which can usually be bypassed by users who can find a “skip this ad” message, can run for any length of time. Most run 15 or 20 seconds. Alt. def: An advertising package that gives a sponsor all the ad units on a Web site.

Video ads
Ads in the form of a video, rather than a banner, display or text ad.

Video buy
An ad buy involving video.

Online Video Ads Signal Digital Style

According to a new online video survey conducted by independent research company TNS, the medium itself can be as valuable as the message it conveys. Results of the AOL/Google Online Video Survey conducted from July 9 to July 15, 2007 were based on online survey responses from 2,394 online video viewers between 18 and 54 years old. Forty-one percent of respondents said that after they see a brand featured in an online video ad, they were more likely to think of that brand as having a strong digital presence on the Internet. Proving, that the deployment of online video advertising can play a unique and critical role in representing a brand as being digitally-focused and digitally-accessible with audiences online. In fact, the survey found that one in three respondents said that they thought brands featured in online videos were perceived as "innovative" (32%), "creative" (32%), and "fun" (30%). Which just goes to show, leveraging the online video medium, also lifts overall brand perception.

But take note, the survey pointed out YouTubers still command the lion's share for audiences, with most users having requested a video-sharing website in the past month (77%), followed by news sites (55%) and broadcast TV sites (49%) as their favourite online-video destinations. Lest we forget that PwC research only recently found that 50 percent of consumers surveyed said that they would skip online video with pre-roll ads, hence Google InVideo.

Google's InVideo ads on YouTube, are we feel, just a prologue to something more akin to actual in-content advertising using video hyperlink technology, such as VideoClix. So it was no surprise to learn that 43% of those surveyed by TNS said that it was important to be able to click through to a brand's website.