Recently, some colleagues and I attended the Streaming Media East conference in NYC. I found the conference fascinating, not so much for the content of the individual sessions, but for the main themes that bubbled to the surface over two days of exhibits and breakout discussions.

We’ve been here before. Online video gets portrayed as a new environment with new rules and new things to consider and sure, there’s some different dimensions to creating and deploying video as opposed to straight text/images, but at the end of the day, it’s still content. It’s new and still very much in that me-too stage, but companies are going to have to figure out how it serves their business or they’ll stop doing it. Not much different than the web for that matter. And similar rules apply to creating an online video strategy that would apply to creating a web site strategy, or any other business strategy. Understand your audience and their needs, match those needs to your business objectives and create compelling media and features that meet those needs and objectives. Oh, and don’t forget to create goals and how you’re going to measure them. Which brings me to the next point.

Measuring video is hard. Actually, measuring video use is easy at a basic level. What’s hard is measuring how your video is being used outside of your “control” and what’s even harder is figuring out whether your video is actually serving the business need you had in mind. No one has the silver bullet for this one but I think it’s a combination of planning (per my previous point) and doing the hard work to integrate your video statistics into your overall web measurement approach. Out of the box the video stats from OVPs are islands unto themselves, building those bridges will pay off in the long run.

HTML is back in vogue. The most popular session I attended was hands down the discussion on HTML5 and video. The discussion itself wasn’t particularly enlightening, but it is apparent from the interest of that audience combined with the buzz all over the internet (thanks Apple and Adobe!) has elevated this topic to near cult status. Once we parse through the hype, however, HTML5 does have the makings for a quantum shift in the development and deployment of media assets on the Web. The ability to replicate much of the interactive functionality inherent in frameworks such as Flash in a simpler, more open format such as HTML will have ramifications for years to come – and not just for Adobe. We’re going to dive into this topic in much more detail in coming posts – it’s too important to just riff on in a simple blog post such as this one.