In 2007, Apple and Google partnered to change the game for online video forever. On June 20, 2007, Google and Apple announced that YouTube content, newly re-encoded in the H.264 format, could be viewed on the iPhone. This watershed moment led to a drive towards H.264 as a key standard used for online video.
Fast forward almost exactly 3 years, and Google has done something to change the online video world as much, if not more. Today, Google announced the creation of the WebM project. Using technologies obtained with their acquisition of On2 Technologies, Google has open-sourced the VP8 video codec. This is huge news.
What does this mean for the typical consumer? Not much – yet. Today, most Flash video content is encoded using H.264, or other video formats supported by Adobe, who has agreed to support WebM in a future release of Flash. For native viewing of video in the browser without flash using HTML5, there has been a bit of a conflict between browsers. Some browsers have supported H.264 (which costs money to license and redistribute, and threatens to bring greater cost down the road for content distributors), others have supported Ogg Theora, an open-source video format. Until today, Microsoft has said they will support H.264 (which they surely still will), but they also announced today that they will support WebM. Until today, browser authors had to choose between a rock and a hard place – H.264 which brought licensing costs, and Ogg Theora which brought the potential of licensing/patent concerns.
The announcement of WebM by Google creates a huge opportunity for convergence upon a free, open-sourced, non-IP-constrained, video format that can and looks like possibly will, be adopted by most of the major web browsers and mobile platforms.
This is a huge announcement, and we at Invodo look forward to supporting the WebM standard, and providing technology and content to our customers that will work even more broadly and on even more devices.
Earlier today I received an email newsletter that I get every day. A subject line, “Established e-commerce best practices are not set in stone” caught my eye. While the headline was misleading (it actually had more to do with successful direct email campaigns that run counter to currently accepted best practices), it still caught my eye, and is worth reading.
However, the meta-point of the title was very significant, and gave me pause. Think about it for a second. If I were to ask a grocer in 1890 (or even one from the 1980’s) to help me set up a grocery store in 2010, I would be cursed from the beginning.
In 1890, the grocer was the pivotal component of the grocery shopping transaction. The entire transaction literally could not have happened without the grocer. Today, the entire grocery shopping (down to the self-checkout experience) is geared around efficiency and profits – keeping overhead and costs low, transactions high, and the experience pleasant and consumer-focused enough that customers come back, frequently, and buy more (and with greater volume). Doesn’t that sound familiar to you?
Today, we are in the formative years of Internet ecommerce. Our customers regularly hear conflicting guidance from Internet and usability experts, discussions about how “the fold” doesn’t matter, and proof that when it comes to ecommerce, it still does (http://www.invodo.com/html/resources/literature/whitepaper/). Internet ecommerce is so new that you must constantly question, constantly analyze, and constantly investigate how to make the most of the experience you deliver to your customers.
At Invodo, we focus on the role that ecommerce videos play in conversions, with a focus on how the content & technology can together create a bridge to help you make conversions.
We have built an approach to content production that ensures that a viewer can quickly and easily learn what they need to in order to make an informed decision on a product’s value proposition without watching a commercial (far too much online product video is simply re-purposed marketing content from television campaigns). To make a comprehensive solution, we have built technology that helps guide the user to the product page via SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and in turn guides them to the video, even if the player is not in view or not on the page at all, via our Smart Merchandising technology.
When I first fell in love with “the online world”, it was Prodigy. There, ads consisted of horrible ASCII art or 8-bit graphics. When the World Wide Web was born, web pages had gray backgrounds and no images. Now we live in a world where merchandising efforts on your ecommerce site and particularly on your product pages, can make the most of what technology allows today.
Consumers often approach online transactions with trepidation. They don’t want to spend what you might want them to, and they have questions. At Invodo, we believe that well-tuned content delivered through an ecommerce-focused, SEO-tuned video player provides that edge that helps consumers find your products and helps convert them from pondering browsers into satisfied customers.
When you think about eCommerce video, what do you think of?
Personally, I like to think of it as pie. Now, I’m an apple pie fan – but with Invodo being based in Texas, you of course have your all-important pecan pie, and of course the classic pumpkin pie. But… why pie?
Think for a moment about your eCommerce properties. You’ve spent a lot of time and money building the sites that you have today:
Thing is, even though you have a pretty good “meal” going, something is missing. The trick to getting consumers to make that buy decision hinges upon them understanding the product you’re offering to them well enough to change their mind the rest of the way, without losing them to a competitor. Besides being comfort food, pie makes a great analogy for eCommerce video because without it, the meal just isn’t complete. Without eCommerce video, consumers will be less likely to convert than without it.
Just as importantly, you have to understand how to make a good pie – the crust, the filling, the whole deal – or you have to find someone who you trust to make a pie you won’t be disappointed in serving to your family. We’re experienced in the full lifecycle of eCommerce video. Whether you have experience producing or releasing video or not, that doesn’t matter. We’ve got success stories under our belt with customers who’ve never produced video, with customers who have, and with customers who’ve even bought other platforms that just required too much work to keep running.
At Invodo, we are skilled at production, editing, and hosting video, and have created easy to integrate API-driven eCommerce video platform. Give us a call, we can help you to ensure your eCommerce experience is all you want it to be, with fully, easily integrated eCommerce video.
Happy Thanksgiving to our customers, readers, family and friends.
In the 15 years I’ve been watching the web evolve, I think that the last five are the most crucial in how eCommerce evolves. We’re moving from an era when putting up a website with a shopping cart was “good enough” to one where consumers have become very empowered (and very frugal, given the financial condition of the economy for the last several years). Today, consumers shop on price, and they like to make informed decisions before they jump into a purchasing relationship – regardless how small the item may be. We’ve all watched as user-generated content (UGC) has helped to empower the consumer, from the largest retailers to manufacturers and hoteliers and travel destinations alike.
I came to Invodo in October because I believe that the world of online video as a decision-making tool is literally just beginning, and the sky is the limit. Consumers want to know the “ins and outs” of a product before they buy; but they want to be informed in a casual, relaxed way. Think about it – when a friend tells you why he loves his new Motorola Droid, he does it in a calm, evangelical way. He doesn’t do it like a salesman trying to close you on a new car. We believe that the same is true when informing consumers. Invodo seeks to deliver unique content, in an efficient way, that helps consumers to make informed buying decisions and result in satisfied customers instead of returns due to the product not working the way the consumer might have thought it could or should.
Too many vendors today assume that organizations have:
While different organizations may vary, at Invodo we’re pretty sure that if the above was the case, everyone would already have video content on their eCommerce site, instead of having plans for implementing it in 2010, as huge numbers of organizations do.
Our goal is to provide a great, rapidly evolving platform with world-class ease of implementation and incredibly compelling – yet “pain-free” content generation. We believe that we’re pretty unique in the industry in doing that, and we look forward to showing more and more customers how and why we’re different. It’s truly an exciting time to be working in the eCommerce video market.
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