Brightcove Presents an 8-Point Framework for Online Video Success

Are you doing everything you need to do to get your videos watched? At the Streaming Media Europe conference, currently underway in London, Luke Gaydon, senior director for strategic accounts, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, at Brightcove presented a roadmap for online video success.

The people at video distributor Brightcove noticed several common elements among clients that did well with online video. As a result, they created a framework to help guide new players in the field. Those new players are often commercial brands or government agencies. Gaydon said that Brightcove has seen an explosion in video from non-media companies.

Mix

Present a variety of types of video content, advised Gaydon. Offer short-form and long-from, live and on-demand. Blending live events with an on-demand library is especially powerful. If leads a whole new audience to the on-demand clips and delivers strong traffic growth. The barriers to entry for live have dropped: it's now affordable to produce and much easier than before.

Quantity

How big a video library do you have? Library sizes are exploding, said Gaydon, and not only for large broadcasters. Churches, for example, might have thousands of pieces of legacy content. If you need to grow your own video library, there are options besides doing it in-house. You can accept mobile uploads from customers, look to a content aggregator like 5Min Media, ask your business partners if you can repurpose their videos, or check with different divisions of your own company.

Quality

It's now possible to encode videos into multiple files, so that each device gets a copy optimized for best performance. There's no excuse for delivering a poor experience, said Gaydon. Ask yourself how good does your video look? And how interesting is the content to viewers?

Discovery

Some companies create a lot of video content, create a nice player to show it, and then bury it on the site, said Gaydon. They don't offer search, use categories, or include meta tags. If you're going to go to the trouble of creating a video library, be sure everyone can find it.

Distribution

Nowadays, companies need to find their customers wherever they are. Video viewing on social networks grew 40 percent, as measured earlier this year.

Devices

Leave no screen behind, advised Gaydon. Mobile devices are huge now and connected TVs may well overtake them. There will be 10 billion mobile connected devices by 2016, greater than the world population (estimated to be 7.3 billion by then). Be sure your videos are available on all devices.

Monetization

Create revenue with actions, ads, and authorization. For companies just starting out with online video, this is the least important element.

Analytics

Surrounding the entire framework is analytics. "That which is measured improves," said Gaydon. The importance of quality analytics can't be overestimated. Companies that succeed in online video keep a close watch on performance and waste no time in swapping out content that performs poorly.

To view the entire presentation, watch the video below:

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net