Online Video - The Killer Marketing Weapon
My first encounter with online video was in 1997 at a trade Vidvamp Review show in London. A large grey mysterious box named a 'streaming encoder' was being demonstrated to a handful of passers-by and it was, we were told, going to take-off in a big way, most likely for creating pay-per-view music events via the Internet. To the left of their box sat a video recorder playing out a concert performance, to the right was a Windows NT workstation showing the exact same concert after it had passed through the box and been fed over a 56kb/s dial-up connection. The quality of the video and audio was horrendous, no where near a standard that anyone could view for an extended period, let alone pay to receive. No one I knew associated the Web with viewing videos in any case, so it felt like an iffy delivery medium aimed at a non-existent audience. I took a brochure and moved on.
Forward to 2005, YouTube launched, its growth enhanced by fast unmetered Broadband access which was becoming commonplace. Audiences viewing online video grew exponentially, as did the numbers of individuals creating and uploading their own video content or sharing video via social networks. Statistics generated by this activity are being published continually, and they are getting ever more difficult to get my head around. By 2014 Cisco estimates that 90% of all Internet traffic will be video; hardly surprising as YouTube alone intakes 100 years of video every day - no, that isn't a typo - end to end it would take 100 years to watch all of the video which is uploaded to the site each and every day, and whilst it is the largest, YouTube is far from being the only video portal on the Internet.
Businesses are finally beginning grasp the fact that online video is now one of the largest marketing opportunities ever. This is especially good news for startups as it is a medium where great creativity doesn't necessarily demand a huge budget. Furthermore if you involve and excite your target audience they will further distribute your content for you. Indeed, many niche startup businesses have become some of the leading exponents of the medium, often using it as their sole marketing activity.
