The main reason why I cared is not because I’m a diehard soccer fan, but because we just expected to be able to watch the games. Live. Wherever we were at that moment. In good quality. With good audio (vuvuzelas notwithstanding). And a host of other features to keep us interested. And we did. Online. Over the phone. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve come to expect that we can consume a live event of the magnitude of the World Cup online. I mean – that is cool.

But does it matter to your business? How does this relate at all? In some ways, of course, it doesn’t. Sports have been a driver for many of the mega-events in recent online video history, primarily due to the nature of the events themselves. But outside of the media world – what does this mean for your online video strategy:

Go global. If your company has a global presence this event certainly confirmed what you may already know….that audiences around the globe have the capability and desire to consume online video. But don’t just throw anything out there. Make sure you provide the proper translations and content to fit the needs of the region you are targeting.

Interactivity = engagement. The majority of the implementations had a high level of interactive features woven into the experience. The ESPN3 player allowed the ability to switch between games, languages, get stats, chat with others. It’s not just about providing the moving pictures. The ability to customize players with interactive details and hot spots is growing quickly and provides many businesses with the ability to create more engagement and calls to action towards your ultimate business goal.

Be where your users are. The success of online video with an event like the World Cup hinged directly on providing fans the ability to get their fix wherever they were – at work, on the road, at home. This means thinking not just about video on your website but also how to syndicate your assets externally and how you might leverage mobile platforms to deliver your message to your users.

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.

It is beyond value what a content publisher, advertiser, syndicator or whoever else you can think of can glean from metrics that track the behavior of viewers of video content. Here are some key items that can be “gleaned”:

• Popularity of certain videos
• Which kinds of video content retains users (e.g., short form vs. long form, ad-supported vs. free, etc)
• Abandonment of playback (e.g., when does a user call it quits on a clip)
• How is the content shared? Does a user send it to a friend, to Facebook, to a blog?

This kind of data can clearly help a variety of video content providers and advertisers target content better to their users and produce better content overall. In this space, Omniture has been leading the charge for a while now with their SiteCatalyst product suite, which includes specific video metrics. The product suite includes an API which can integrate directly into a Flash-based video player, with particularly close integration with Brightcove’s video players, and provides hooks to track the various user behaviors that can occur during video playback.

Google does not want to be left behind in this space, given that they wish to “organize the world’s information”, and have recently opened up a relatively new component of their Google Analytics to all users of that service. The Event Tracking API has now been added to all Google Analytics accounts, whereas previously it was an invite-only beta feature. This portion of their analytics API allows you to track almost arbitrary event-oriented data, without affecting the more conventional web site-oriented metrics, such as pageviews. Event Tracking really enables users of Google Analytics to leverage the platform for video tracking, allow you to define and measure user events that are important to your video content and players. Here are some examples:

• Start playback of video
• Pauses and resumes
• Skipping backwards or forwards in a clip
• Turning the volume up or down
• How far the user got before stopping or moving to another clip

But the richness this kind of event tracking doesn’t stop there. With the proliferation of RIA applications on the web, you now have the opportunity to track user behavior, beyond video playback, at a greater level of detail.

• Track search terms within Flash or Flex-based applications
• Follow navigation paths through RIA applications without incurring page views in your metrics
• Track viral features in a video player or other RIA application: blog posts & social link sharing (Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon)
• The list goes on…

Check out a great primer on using the API at the link below.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/02/using-google-analytics-within.html