Industry Interview: Vendaria

sm.com: Let’s briefly go through a couple of the solutions.
Roth: The primary focus of our company is delivering rich media at the point of purchase. Our customers are the manufacturers of these products; retailers are not our customers. While it’s free to retailers, deploying third-party code their Web sites is not a small undertaking. For many of these companies, we were the first outside third party who was allowed to deploy code on their site and that where our technology comes in. When a consumer is presented with the "watch video" button on the retailer’s Web site and they click that button, they get the video. If we determine for some reason that that particular configuration isn’t going to work or is going to require a download of some sort, we simply don’t deploy the "watch video" button. So that consumer doesn’t know that they even missed an opportunity to see it. We figure that they are going to go through the process of downloading RealPlayer of whatever else they need somewhere else, some other time but not in the midst of their shopping experience. Consumers do not have to select which player to use, or which bandwidth they have. Even sophisticated users of the Internet often don’t know the answers to those questions or make the wrong decision, and therefore have a bad experience with streaming media.

sm.com: So they make it too much about the technology?
Roth: Yes, it’s too much about the technology. Nobody cares; all they want is the information about that product. In essence, what we’re doing is looking at millions of different combinations of browser types, media players, and locations and so forth and then selecting the best configuration upon which to deliver that video to that particular consumer.

The other part of this is that we built this company based on being able to deliver a consistent, reliable video to a dial-up modem user. The VCs financing these deals were hot on broadband plays and we weren’t one so we weren’t getting their attention, but we did get the attention of our customers and of the retailers because they know that their customers are not on broadband, or at least an insignificant amount of them were and for this to have any sort of impact it had to work at dial-up modem speeds.

sm.com: For the masses…
Roth: For the masses. The vast number of streams that we deliver are still at 35K or better delivery speeds. All of the content that we are delivering is specifically built to be delivered at dial-up speeds and to meet the needs of the consumer. Early on we did some focus-group testing as to how long these videos should be and what information they should contain. It became very apparent that the consumers aren’t interested in advertising messages at this point in the process. They are interested in learning more about the features and benefits of that product. That doesn’t require high-level production that doesn’t stream well.

Based on focus group testing, we’ve found the tolerance of waiting for video is about 15-18 seconds. With that said, we never want them to take 15 seconds, we want them to take 5, 6, 8, or 12 seconds, even on dial-up. If we detect that there’s a hiccup in one of the distribution networks that we’re using, after a certain number of seconds we flip it to another one – in a seamless fashion that the viewer never knows occurred.