[Brightcove](http://www.brightcove.com/en) has always been considered the expensive online video platform boasting large media companies as customers who want rich syndication and monetisation tools. In 2007 when [vzaar](http://vzaar.com) entered the online video platform market, we didn’t consider Brightcove to be our competition. They were high end, the big boys catering to the needs of enterprise companies who had massive video inventories and remits to monetise them, and we were low end providing smaller forward thinking companies with a simple and easy to use video service allowing them to merchandise their products or services. In other words, we were at the opposite ends of the market. This however is no longer with their recent remarkable announcement.
**November 2009**–Brightcove announce Brightcove 4 and with that Brightcove Express targeting companies that don’t have the budget to spend $6,000 a year for its “Professional” packages. The starting price on this new package is $99/month with no annual contract. You can read the actual press release [here](http://www.brightcove.com/en/company/press/brightcove-4-online-video-platform-unveiled)
This announcement represents a milestone for online video as we know it. Brightcove is the leading online video platform, and their arrival to the mid section of the market place means that video has arrived and is being embraced by small and medium sized online businesses. It means that online business who are using video are becoming more mainstream and this has been a long time coming. We welcome their arrival, competition is good, driving innovation and the end users are and will be the beneficiaries of this. Their presence “on our patch” is a good thing. It means more businesses are using online video platforms and they are not just at the top end of the market.
To see more information on their offering go [here,](http://www.brightcove.com/en/video-platform/editions-and-pricing) and if you are interested in comparing vzaar’s offering versus theirs go [here.](http://vzaar.com/pricing)
We reckon we are a good alternative to Brightcove, because our service is focused on you. Our philosophy at vzaar is the video is the ad and our users want an easy to use service.
If you need to monetise your video with ads, go to Brightcove. They have industry leading solutions for this. If you do not have the need to monetise your video content and want an intuitive service then please consider [vzaar](http://vzaar.com/pricing).
Archive for November 2009
Bienvenido Brightcove Express
Date: Thurs 26th November
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST
This Thursday we kick off the first in a number of online webinars designed to help you make the most of online video. This week we are showing how eBay sellers in the United States can use vzaar via the eBay Selling Manager Applications program.
The tutorial will cover:
* Logging into your vzaar account
* Making the most of your vzaar Settings & Features
* Adding a video to your eBay listing
* Video Best Practice Tips
You can reserve your seat here and also review the vzaar application on eBay here
We look forward to having you join the webinar.
Onethirdeach – Video Advertising for Charity
We recently came by an interesting charitable online venture based around the concept of a sustainable business that can deliver a broad, internet savvy audience to advertisers. Called onethirdeach, they were also using vzaar video to serve their message so we asked owner Paul Burke to tell us what he was up to.
Onethirdeach is a new business offering a unique way to deliver content and advertising to a growing national and international audience.
The aim has been to create a business suitable for the times, a business that gives two thirds of its generated revenue away, one third to the winner of a free prize draw, and another third to charity. The final third goes to the business to develop the website(s) and business model as well as sponsoring other draws throughout the year.
Income is generated by selling time-slots on the website to advertisers and other content providers who place their content on a large screen on the site. Time-slots are of multiples of 15 seconds, but this is just a start time. You can deliver longer content to the visitor. If they visit the site during your time-slot they will receive only your content.
Unsold slots fill with existing adverts, so early adopters are rewarded. Onethirdeach has a target of a charity donation of $1,000,000 by the end of 2010. It also aims to raise at least $333,000 by Christmas 2009 to be shared between three charities as voted for by visitors.
If you are a vzaar user with video content that you’d like to advertise to the visitors of onethirdeach then you can contact Paul here
*We invited Kris Drey of video comparison site VidCompare to pen his thoughts on the dilemmas facing small businesses when considering online video as a means of marketing.*
Small businesses today are struggling to be seen, to be heard, to garner traction in a highly competitive and economically suffocating environment. Funding from angel investors and venture capitalists has slowed to a trickle, marketing budgets have been slashed, and the economy is not picking up fast enough.
Where do businesses turn to build their brand, increase traffic, and generate incremental revenue during these rough times? The answer is online video. There’s no questioning the power of online video today; [broadband adoption](http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0906/) is nearly ubiquitous in the US, [25 billion videos are streamed on a monthly basis](http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/9/Google_Sites_Surpasses_10_Billion_Video_Views_in_August), video advertising is the fastest growing segment in the Internet advertising market according to the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), and search engines are incorporating video into their blended search results at a break-neck pace.
**Where do I start?**
Getting started with online video may seem like a daunting task. The questions I hear most often are, “How am I going to find or create video content?”, “Will I need a team of 10 engineers to implement it?”, and “Will it absorb the majority of my already diminishing marketing budget?”.
The first thing to do is to take a step back, relax, and get organized. Most businesses go into the process unsure of their goals and lacking an online video strategy and as a result become confused by all the options, and nuances of online video.
Producing video yourself is a viable option today. YouTube has numbed us to the issue of poor quality video so grab your Flip camera or your iPhone 3GS and shoot a few practice videos. Be sure you have good lighting, and hold the camera steady; you may want to invest in a tripod. Don’t worry too much about sound quality or a fluid shoot at first, you can edit these things with free software after you’ve captured your content. If you don’t feel confident in your shooting and editing prowess then find yourself a high-quality and affordable production company like [TurnHere](http://turnhere.com/). They offer professional online video production services including video capture, editing, and scripting.
Once you’ve created your content, find a place to store and manage it. An Online Video Platform (OVP) provider, like [vzaar](http://vzaar.com), is a great place to start. OVPs simplify the entire process by offering top-to-bottom services including ingestion, encoding, storage, management, analytics, monetization, and playback of your videos. After settling into an OVP you’re only a copy/paste away from adding video to your web site. Put your video front and center on your home page and other high traffic pages. Be sure to tie page content to the video content, not only to maintain consistent messaging but also to enhance search engine optimization (SEO). The copy on the page around your video and the metadata (title, description, tags) stored within the video will help propel your content to the top of the search engine ranks.
Video SEO is a powerful weapon today for online marketers allowing them to push their content to the web with a few simple clicks (see [TubeMogul](http://tubemogul.com/) if your OVP doesn’t have proper syndication services), capable of garnering first page and often #1 rankings within natural search on the engines.
Video solutions are in abundance today, with over 60 OVPs out there offering a wide range of services. Furthermore, video is highly affordable and dead-easy to implement. Online Video Platforms often offer free trials or a free solution, with limited streams and uploads, allowing you to get started in video with little to no overhead.
2010 will be a defining year for the online video space as it creeps out of infancy into toddlerhood. Businesses of all sizes with an online presence either already have video on their site or are evaluating solutions and setting aside marketing dollars to engage their customers with OV.
Video Killed The Photography Star?
When I’m not wearing my [vzaar](http://vzaar.com) hat, it’s photography, where I concentrate my enthusiasm and attention. So how come I’m writing about video then?
Photography had undergone a huge shift in the last 6-8 years: the emergence of digital technology transformed photography from an expensive and elitist craft to the toy of the masses. Taking pictures became suddenly much easier and cheaper which soon resulted in an abundance of photos – just take a look at [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/search/?s=int&w=all&q=vzaar&m=text), where millions of photos are uploaded every day.
The new paradigm changed the face of the business and the emergence of new platforms, like the internet, created new opportunities, though many photographers weren’t delighted by the new horizons digital opened up.
Last August, almost simultaneously, Canon and Nikon introduced two new DSLR cameras that were capable of recording HD video. To showcase the capabilities of the camera bodies, both companies hired a renowned photographer, Vincent Laforet and Chase Jarvis, respectively, and they created amazing videos with the new technology.
You could ask, why DSLRs with HD are such an enticing things for photographers. The reason is that it allows you to use your existing lenses and thus create effects, find angles, use techniques, that would normally require a professional video camera.
The effects of this shift is still unclear and there are implications on many levels that we even might not be aware of at the moment. For example, as Vincent Laforet pointed out in a blogpost, what happens at a major sports event, if a photographer records and broadcasts HD video, even though he doesn’t own the TV rights. Beforehand, this wasn’t an issue, as the two fields were separated technologically.
Right now, photographers can still ignore video and stick to still pictures only – like analogue remained dominant for a long time when digital came into existence. But it is here and it’s getting more and more important and we all need to figure out how it will the current paradigm.
In the meantime, I started to think about selling one my Canon bodies to buy a video-capable one and start to experiment with it. Because this new world will be here sooner than we would think.
- 11 young entrepreneurs on the power of video marketing: http://t.co/OR66WfYK via @B2Community 1 day ago
- Learn how @DrNajeeb has built a million dollar e-learning business with vzaar: http://t.co/aZpd7Xgo 5 days ago
- Is it the weekend yet? Kill some time until it is by taking our customer survey : https://t.co/pftRRr3D 5 days ago
- More updates...
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