I’ve just returned from the 2010 Video Commerce Summit hosted by my company, Liveclicker. This is the second time the summit was held in Seattle, WA.  In all, the summit was 2X the size of last year’s with 75 onsite attendees from many of the top e-commerce sites including Amazon.com, Bed Bath & Beyond, Zappos, Microsoft, Costco, Nordstrom, REI, Overstock.com, and over 20 others.  REELSEO was onsite for videography.  Throughout this week we’ll see interviews on REELSEO.com highlighting learnings from the speakers and attendees.

I’m still digesting all of the information from the summit so beware the below thoughts are somewhat stream of consciousness as I reflect on the state of the video commerce industry.

• The manner in which retailers are using video varies widely today, however most e-commerce…

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Like many others, yesterday I huddled in line for close to 11 hours to pick up the coveted iPhone 4 (much to the chagrin of my wife, I’ll add). After playing with the phone now for half a day, I’m more convinced than ever that this phone is going to have a meaningful impact on the online video world.  Here are just a few initial predictions:

• More people are going to want to watch video on their phones because of this phone. Watching video on the iPhone 4 is actually pleasant.  While video on the older iPhones was a ‘game changing’ step forward in terms of quality, the higher resolution screen of the iPhone 4 pushes it to a new level.  Even skeptics are going to have a very difficult time arguing that the quality improvement made possible by such rich pixel density doesn’t make a significant and noticeable…

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About a month ago I moderated a panel on video commerce in New York alongside panelists Scott Anderson of Vitamin Shoppe, Robert Schwartz of Ogilvy, and Jason Arend of PFI Western.  Scott shared his vision for video commerce at Vitamin Shoppe, which is just now launching an online video effort.  Robert shared examples for both Sears and IBM.  Finally, Jason closed the panel by highlighting the results of PFI Western’s multi-channel video commerce strategy.  Questions ensued - please enjoy:

This year REELSEO is attending the IRCE in Chicago.  The VCC is assisting REELSEO in identifying any retailers that may be interested in being interviewed for an upcoming article on online video in e-commerce.  If you or one of your teammates is attending the Internet Retailer conference and is interested in an interview opportunity, please drop me an email at justin [at] video [dash] commerce [dot] org.

This week I co-presented a webinar on HTML5 video in e-commerce with Walt Mann, Founder/CTO of Liveclicker. The material is very best practices focused so I thought it worthy of posting up on the VCC blog.  You can listen to the audio by downloading the HTML5 video webinar material, or you can thumb through the slides on Slideshare.

The webinar covered:

- Overview of what HTML5 video is

- HTML5 video adoption curves

- Browsers and devices that support HTML5 video (and those that don’t)

- The state of HTML5 video codecs (OGG Theora, H.264, WebM) and why they matter

- Flash v. HTML5 video

If for some reason you were living on a remote uninhabited island for the last week, you probably didn’t hear about Steve Jobs’ blog post highlighting Apple’s position on why it’s not planning to support Flash on the iPhone or iPad anytime soon.  Otherwise, you’ve probably at least heard of Apple’s position if you didn’t read the post in its entirety.  For the sake of brevity, I’ll provide the short version:

1. Apple has no plans to support Flash on the iPhone or iPad.
2. Ever.

As an online retailer, why should you care?  For starters, over 1 million iPads have already been sold since its launch (in 28 days).  That is twice the pace of sales as the original iPhone, despite the iPad’s higher price tag.  Love it or hate it, the iPad is a hit.  With a bigger screen, consumers may quickly make the iPad a strong…

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In my last post on video distribution, I outlined the foundations of a smart e-commerce video distribution strategy.  Today, we’ll build upon those lessons by further detailing something I call “smart channel enablement.”  We’ll look at video+SEO best practices but branch beyond search to show how to maximize the value of video distribution regardless of channel.

To start, I’ll posit the three pillars of a successful video commerce distribution strategy are as follows:

1.  Interactive Opportunities: your off-site e-commerce videos must embrace interactivity to drive purchases.  Without interactivity, it’s difficult to connect shoppers with e-commerce opportunities.

2.  Broad Reach: a large enough audience must see your e-commerce videos, or top line revenues will suffer.

3.  Rich Relevance: your e-commerce videos must be seen by the right audience, or not enough people will buy to make the program worth its while.

If any of these pillars are missing in your video distribution strategy, it is destined to fail.  Learn why and read tips to ensure your…

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YouTube’s announcement last week that it would begin supporting automated video captioning caused a lot of excitement in the video commerce and video SEO worlds.  Then the balloon popped.

Automating speech-to-text has long been a goal of those seeking to make video more search engine friendly.   Unfortunately, the YouTube technology isn’t ready for prime time.  Google says the technology is in “beta,” but applying that moniker might be going a little far.  The technology is so bad it’s almost embarrassing.  I’d go into details, but in this case, a video’s worth a thousand words.

1.  Click on then hover your mouse over the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the player, then hover your mouse over the small arrow directly to the left of the CC icon.

2.  Click “transcribe audio.”

For now, the best practice in transcribing speech to…

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For some time we’ve touted the merits of video distribution in video commerce.  I believe video distribution is more important now than ever for e-commerce merchants.  Unfortunately, I also think most online retailers misunderstand video distribution and therefore are at risk of implementing poor video distribution strategies.

Why distribute e-commerce video?

Video distribution is important because it enables retailers to multiply the effectiveness of video assets without additional investment in video production.  I often tell e-commerce merchants, “a video on the product page and the product page alone is a terrible waste of revenue potential.”

Over the last year and a half, my thinking around video distribution has become increasingly nuanced as I’ve witnessed more retailers employ distribution in their video commerce strategies.  While I remain a huge proponent of video distribution, there are now more case studies to draw upon that illustrate where video works, where it doesn’t, and why….

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Video in email is a topic we’ve covered recently on the VCC blog.  On February 24, Google made in-email video closer to reality for email recipients who maintain Gmail accounts.

Previously, Gmail users could view Youtube videos in their webmail client, but only when Youtube previews were enabled via the Labs tab available under the Settings menu in Gmail.  In other words, very few Gmail users actually took advantage of this functionality.  Now, Google has rolled Youtube previews out across all Gmail subscribers.  All that is required to view video in Gmail is to include a Youtube link.  There are still issues email marketers will want to be aware of:

1.  In order for videos to display, they must be on Youtube.

2.  Videos do not display “in” the email, but instead show up as expandable thumbnail players at the bottom of email messages.

From the video commerce perspective, this…

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