If you've ever posted a comment on YouTube you'll have noticed
that whilst the functionality is perfectly adequate it's not truly
interactive. You can comment on a video ("I love this!") but you
can't necessarily provide much context or time accuracy ("I love it
when she kisses that guy! - it's about 3 minutes in").
For a real-life example, take a look at the Football section on the
Guardian website. Along with stories and editorial, the
Guardian regularly links to videos
on YouTube to showcase brilliant goals, free kicks and other
mad skills and again, it's common to see a time annotation. The
user clicks the link, goes to YouTube and has to manually forward
the video to the relevant bit.
vPlayer, a new online video player created by
90:10 Labs, has innovated
through this problem by, first, integrating comments functionality
with Facebook and Twitter (more on this in a moment) and second,
and rather impressively, incorporating time-stamp functionality so
that you can link to a specific point within a video. This is
demonstrated nicely on
Hyundai's Facebook page. Play the video and you can see some
vertical white lines inside the player interface which denote when
other viewers have had their comments time-stamped. Scroll over
those lines and you'll see the comment that was left there.
So let's talk about the Facebook / Twitter integration. What
does this do and why is it good? Well, comments that you leave on
YouTube stay on YouTube - there's no further social element. With
vPlayer however, because comments are made via Facebook IDs and can
automatically be posted as status updates and tweets, audiences are
less likely to drift to other social media sites. This is a boon
for brands.
90:10 Labs are already working with companies like Microsoft and
Hyundai who, once they become clients, get access to vPlayer's
dashboard which gives them a wealth of demographic data about who's
looking at their content. This is another advantage over YouTube
and means that brands can find out much more about their watchers
than ever before.
As for cost, vPlayer can be licensed directly from 90:10 Labs
either as a fully hosted service or integrated into an existing
platform. Individual videos can be loaded, or whole series can be
used in order to build a community of users around certain video
brands.
It's an interesting new take on the video player and well worth
a look.
For more information on vPlayer contact Mike Litman at 90:10
Labs (mike@ninety10group.com) or
download the product
PDF.