Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Mar 26, 2009 @ 04:37 PM
We were happy to announce this week our fourth season of powering QuickKicks for Major League Soccer. Completely redesigned, this year has all of our premium video navigation and discovery features as well as a remix capability.
A key question we ask all our customers is, “How can you best convert your visitors to viewers?” For many sites, the common tactics are just a list of clips in order of most recent to oldest and a search box. Major League Soccer is using Gotuit to better organize and present their content so that there are more interesting playlists and a more engaging viewing experience to covert those visitors.
For example, MLS chose to layout their video with the following top level choices:
- One Touch - this will show the star MLS players and all their best plays
- Amazing Plays - only the best of the best across all the games
- Games of the week - where each game gets its own playlist
- Archive - every game from past weeks
Within any game, the editorial choices are:
- Game Highlights
- Goals
- Saves
- Player Spotlight #1
- Player Spotlight #2
The result is that visitors are drawn to personalize their experience, by choosing the best plays, or just the goals, or just their favorite players.
For example, here is the first goal in franchise history for the Seattle Sounders FC:
Better content presentation results in increased traffic and longer session times.
MLS took it even further this year by enabling user-authored remixing. This deepens the engagement with the audience, by allowing them to create their own highlight reels and then share them with the community. The community can vote on their favorites here in the gallery. Here is one I liked called The Yellow Card March:
When a user creates their own remix, they are motivated to share the link and/or embed the video, as you can see on the March 24th post in the popular soccer blog (The Footy Blog) here.
All of this is accomplished using Gotuit metadata which acts as a lens into the original, unedited source game video. No video editing or clipping is ever done.
With rich, structured metadata, publishers can unleash the full value of their video libraries. For MLS, this means knowing the Team, Week, Player(s), Play Type(s) of each individual scene in their game video and leveraging that information into a better user experience.
Are you doing all you can to convert your visitors to viewers?
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Wed, Mar 18, 2009 @ 01:12 PM
WWE just released another promotional video both on their site on YouTube, encouraging people to use WWE Smash-Ups. This one features The Miz and John Morrison.
Enjoy!
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Fri, Mar 13, 2009 @ 09:44 PM
If you are a long-form video publisher looking for better ways to engage your audience, check out what we have just done with World Wrestling Entertainment. As part of their promotion leading up to Wrestlemania 25, WWE has put together a video application called WWE Smash-Ups. Powered by Gotuit, this application lets fans access highlights from 25 years worth of thrilling WWE video, then create their own 2 minute highlight reel. The best highlight reel will win $5000, and there are other prizes as well.
The Smash-Ups defined by the viewer take advantage of Gotuit’s advanced metadata capabilities that allow viewers to define their own favorite scenes from within long-form video and then put those scenes together in a custom order. No new video files are actually created, making it easy and efficient to scale. They also have the ability to associate an audio bed to the remix.
This builds on our other remix implementations with customers such as Lifetime, but there are several major technical improvements that we did to handle the large amount of WWE traffic and to deliver the best user experience. Try it out and take notice of the vastly simplified scene-authoring and remix-creation process. There are also new feeds for the Top 100 based on user voting and Most Watched Smash-Up, both on an all-time and weekly basis.
The site leverages our integration with both DoubleClick and Advertising.com to serve in-stream and in-page advertising. Our flexible advertising policy capabilities allow WWE to set exactly the amount of advertising they want to serve based on either the amount of video watched or the time on site.
We think the site looks tremendous, thanks to our partnership with Brothers By Choice, the agency who created the outstanding graphics.
It is being heavily promoted by WWE, both on their site as well as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube. They even have the WWE Superstars getting into it. Enjoy this promotion video starring the Bella Twins:
Go check out WWE Smash-Ups, and if you are a long-form video publisher looking for better monetization and user engagement, think about how you could make your archive available to your audience and let them define their own favorite moments and remixes. It’s a great way to drive incremental viewing.