Video Articles

Welcome back to our weekly Viral Video Round Up series, where I pick some of my favorite viral videos from the past week or so and attempt to figure out what it is that made them so popular.  The hope is that we can, as video creators and marketers, gain a better understanding of the [...]

YouTube is clearly very high on video captioning.  They’ve continued over the last few years to roll out and refine services for captioning—including an auto captioning service we wrote about back in March.  And now they’ve created a badge of sorts for the various vendors that sell captioning services to video creators. YouTube Ready is [...]

At ReelSEO, we love video. We love making it, watching it, marketing it, and writing about it.  And we have all kinds of readers.  Some are polished experts that—quite frankly—sometimes know more than we do about a particular aspect of online video.  Some are intermediate users, who create and market a lot of video but [...]

YouTube has launched a new “video” today to celebrate and advertise the Chrome browser, which recently became the third-most-popular browser in the United States.  One of the reasons it’s so popular is its speed, and this video attempts to celebrate that attribute. The piece is called “Chrome FastBall.“  It’s really more of a game than [...]

YouTube agreed with us on several points lately. We’re not sure if they knew they were doing it or not but they have. The main point is that while HTML 5 is cool and has a lot of potential, it’s not going to replace Flash very soon. GooTube has already been hard at work porting [...]

Pre-roll ads for online video are among the least popular with users, because they have no choice but to wait for the ad to finish before they’re able to see the content they came for.   Often times the pre-roll ad is longer than the actual video itself, which only adds to the frustration.  Now YouTube [...]

The demand for video from consumers has long been identified and early adopters in the e-tailing segment, such as Zappos, have publicly announced their intention to provide video alongside tens of thousands of product offerings in the coming year. There is a developing consensus that video is an important medium for highlighting the features of [...]

Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of the rock band OK Go, will give a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.

OK Go is perhaps best known on the web for its mega-viral “Here it Goes Again,” the famous music video of the band dancing on treadmills. OK Go choreographed and shot the video themselves, and posted it to YouTube in 2006 without the record label’s permission. A legion of bloggers and positive word of mouth helped popularize the video and launched the band into the stratosphere. “Here it Goes Again” has been transmitted over 200 million times and counting.

Since then, OK Go has produced a number of other massively viral videos, each more creative than the last (be sure to check out the amazing video for “This Too Shall Pass,” for which the band built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine). The videos have been an effective promotional tool and have continued to earn the band exposure. But earlier this year, a decision by the band’s record label to forbid embedding videos on blogs and other social media created a small controversy. The move frustrated fans and followers, and views dropped precipitously. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000,” Kulash explains in a recent New York Times op-ed.

As one of the bands to most successfully leverage the web, OK Go are at the center of a discussion of how artists can reap success from sharing and open networks. In addition to being a major creative force, Kulash and company are also outspoken advocates for an open internet—in 2008, Kulash served as a lead witness for a House judiciary committee hearing on net neutrality.

Join us this Fall to hear from Kulash about the relationship between artists, their fans, and the new distribution channels. And keep an eye out for more information about Open Video Conference. Registration begins next week!

Firefogg is an open source browser plugin that automatically converts videos to open formats. Sites like Wikipedia use it to streamline conversion and uploading in a single step.

Firefogg 1.2, has just released, adding WebM support and a host of other features. There are now three easy options for users to endcode to WebM—VLC, Miro Video Converter, and Firefogg. With Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers all shipping WebM in the near future, the project is demonstrating how agile open source development can be.

Frank N. Magid Associates, Inc., in conjunction with Metacafe, has released the results of a new online video survey, and you’ll be happy to know that online video is still very popular, especially with young people.  Phew.  I was getting worried there. But seriously, some of the findings are very interesting and worth discussion—you can [...]

Want to make money and grow audiences with an iPad app? Then learn the secrets to iPad app success! In this week’s New Media Minute, I share key takeaways and best practices for brands, marketers and content creators who want to make compelling iPad apps. Tags: iPad, New Media Minute

One of the most common ways that YouTube users violate copyright laws is by using unlicensed background music in their video.  Unfortunately, this act also tends to get videos pulled, after copyright holders are alerted to the infringement via YouTube’s Content ID service.  And to be fair, a lot of users are just flat-out ignorant [...]

You all know you want to know how to do stuff and we the Reel Masters are back with a new how-to round up. This time we’re going to show you how to watch WebM/VP8 encoded video. Really, it’s all in the software. What you need is either a video player or web browser that [...]

UStream co-founder and CEO, John Ham, sat down and talked with TechCrunch’s Jason Kinkaid recently to discuss the future of live streaming video on the web—and the looming prospect of YouTube jumping into that arena.  It’s a pretty interesting read, and I suggest you check it out. What I come away with from this article [...]

So the Webby Awards were a week or so ago, and two of my favorite viral video creators faced off in an epic staring contest.  OK Go versus Animal from the Muppets.  Two of the top creators of viral smash hits in a staring contest—the video of which will itself become a viral smash hit.  [...]

In every area of the economy with potential lies the Madoff’s of this world. You don’t have to go far to find the “get rich quick” schemes peppered all over the internet- preaching the panacea of money making if only you send a $12 refundable deposit to receive 14 hours of cds, combined with the [...]

Following hot on the heels of the latest Viral Video Nostradamus—where I foolishly aim to predict viral video hits—comes the converse of that concept:  the Viral Video Round Up—where I attempt to reverse engineer how some recent video successes managed to go viral.  Let’s dig in: iPhone Issue By now I’m sure you’re aware of [...]

It’s been several weeks since our last Viral Video Nostradamus post, and another attempt at predicting viral success is long overdue.  The hope is that I can hit on at least one of these, and over time begin to have a better understanding about what it is that makes some videos skyrocket and others fizzle.  [...]

It’s certainly long in the coming. YouTube, well technically the Google sites, topped 14.6 billion video streams in May according to comScore. Yes, those computators of computationals are back with their latest stats set, this time it’s for May 2010. What have they to say? Hear ye, Hear ye, comScore has announced the video online [...]

Keep rolling, rolling, rolling…out the new products! Brightroll teamed up with Vizu, Nielsen, InsightExpress and comScore to put together a series of new measurement products for its users. Roll on through to find out more. BrightRoll now has five new products that are aimed at helping you find out exactly what your ROI is for [...]