Web video content a steady and powerful creeper

Richard Raber
Friday, 09 December 2011 14:50

Business IT - Technology

OPINION: I remember the feeling I had when I first saw Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of the Philip K Dick story 'Minority Report'. That this future depicted in the film was not too far away. It wasn't the vertical highways or the spider eye scanners that triggered this thought. It was the rich media.

 

The animated digital pictorials in the newspapers read by train commuters. It was the little animation coming to life on the breakfast cereal box when Tom Cruise's central character shakes the box to see how many more Rice Bubbles are left. It was the eye-scan consumer greeting when Cruise enters a GAP store and is asked about his satisfaction level of his previous purchase.

All right, I hear what you're saying. We're not quite there yet. Not literally, but we do have Google and many other corporate web giants recognizing us and formulating usage patterns based on our consumption and our web browsing - not to mention the suggestions that pop up in the side column of Gmail based on the actual contents of the emails we're writing.

As for rich media, these are interesting times. As a filmmaker who has been pitching various forms of video content to potential clients for nearly a decade, I'm both excited and relieved to see the dawning and spawning of an internet saturated with rich media - especially web video.

I've been telling clients for nearly two years now that they need to watch what's starting to happen in the general Google search results. Video and image content have been creeping up the result hierarchy and this will only get more prolific as time goes on.

I won't bore you with some sort of re-telling of the significance of Google's purchase of YouTube and what that means for video content. That's all pretty basic obvious stuff. It's just one more piece of the web video growth puzzle, albeit a pretty big piece of course.

I recently chatted with Nick Bolton, Head of Media and Entertainment at internet broadcasting company - Viocorp.

Nick predicts an online future where 'brands will become broadcasters'. He foresees a variation on the current model whereby reality TV shows like 'The Block' currently has appropriate and loyal sponsors/advertisers. 'A franchise like Bunnings will probably have its own TV show streaming on its own IPTV portal with a series of 'How To' videos'.

Nick sees a future where every major retailer (and not so major) will have its own online TV channel.    

Nick's comments were interesting to me, as only days prior I'd come across Melbourne construction giant Grocon's attempt at this: www.grocontv.com.au

A kind of in-house online TV channel for Grocon to spruik and showcase its achievements. The production values are high and the overall tone is one that expresses pride of all things Grocon.

I chatted about GroconTV with Jane Wilson, Grocon's Corporate and Governent Affairs Manager. She mentions that it was originally set up as an internal tool for Grocon's vast number of employees to create an effective sharing of knowledge.

'Many of our workers will stay on the same project for several years in one part of the country and have no idea about what Grocon is up to in other states or cities, so this was a way to change that'.

Grocon soon realized some of this video content being created and distributed internally was important for external stakeholders as well. This is how the current form of GroconTV started to evolve as more of a public website.

'People absolutely love the time-lapse photography, it's very popular,' says Jane.   

I suggest to Jane that Grocon should be congratulated for embracing video in this way, as too many large companies don't bother with video unless they can see some cold hard data about how video content will literally convert to sales for them.

'It's a nice bi-product if some of the video somehow leads to more business but essentially it's raising awareness both internally and externally and if you have good product then people are interested in looking at it.'

Jane tells me the story of how the son of a Grocon employee showed a time lapse video on the construction of the AAMI Rectangular Stadium in Melbourne as a Year 6 class presentation, simply because he loved watching the video himself. His dad worked on the Stadium and had shown it to him.

'Little things like that which we're not even aware of but it's a really good marketing tool which is a bit of a bi-product of what we initially set out to do.'

Jane adds that CEO Daniel Grollo occasionally uses the video content in meetings with the help of his iPad if he wants to give people a really quick but engaging overview of a project.

'And when it's a really visually interesting project like the Pixel Building, it's just so much more compelling to see a well produced piece of video than to only just talk about it'.

I couldn't agree with Jane more. I'm not just a producer of video content, I'm a film buff and I've known about the potency of a good film and the lasting effect it can have on an audience. Sure, watching GroconTV videos isn't really going to deliver the same thrills as Spielberg's 'Minority Report', but it's definitely going to hold me on the Grocon website a lot longer than a slab of text.

Post Script:

Stan Beer of iTWire has put it to me that surely a column about web video should be in the form of an actual video, not text! As a response to his provocative statement, I am vowing that my next contribution to iTWire will be a video version of the above article. I look forward to finding out which version - text or video - will yield more of a reaction. Stay tuned'¦

Richard Raber
(Web Video Observer)
Traces Films
www.traces.net.au